Manèges

Project Roundabout is a series of works in which the recreational function of the funfair ride is subverted. Taking the form of improbable maquettes, these works are installed on the floor and on the walls in order to create a narrative space, an environment that the spectator is able to explore. They are made out of wood, [polyester resin] and other materials.

While these « roundabouts » may conserve the classical forms of fairground attractions, bizarre additions and everyday objects have the tendency to slip in. In a mechanized and metaphorical setting, the amusement park ride transforms a hypothetical character’s relationship to the world. The fairground apparatus isolates him, sets him apart in his inanity or provides the framework for his vertigo. Deconstructed architecture calls up the suburbs or else the linearity of a commuter monorail. Chairs perched in space bustle about in vain, tracks go nowhere. Different forms of fairground attractions are borrowed or sometimes stripped of their function or else recontextualized in a murky fiction of compromised fantasy.

This project comes at the end of a series of miniatures in which notions of fiction and reality are explored in a theatrical form. Props and sets form the storyline, constructing a unique world that invites dialogue between objects. In these miniature universes, the façades and surfaces demarcate a zone of artifice. They establish the threshold of oneiric transit where illusion is as much in play as disillusion. The notion of the roundabout, freely developed in a relation opposing it to threatening details and desolate architectures, crystallizes the opposition between the real and the dreamlike. The human experience is instrumentalized, absorbed by a blind and pathetic clockwork. It appears that something wishes to emerge from this absurd routine and to create a moment outside of time.