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FFWD>>

FFWD>> case studies the French cave of Chauvet and the confrontation between human space/time scale and the notion of the Chauvet replica.

The Chauvet paintings were made 35.000 years ago in the region of Monts d’Ardeche near Avignon and discovered by modern civilisation in 1994. Then it was closed to the public for preservation and study. It so happens that the only material contribution that modernity made to this environment is a scaffolding footbridge to avoid contaminating the space with modern germs and bacteria. In FFWD>> we practice this leap to see what happens to that scaffolding 30.000 years from now where existing dynamics have assimilated the structure into time continuum.

Without making it very long, I wanted to resume the recent last steps on FFWD>> project and some important details. It was a real challenge and I wouldn’t want to become “the artist of company archeology”, but this last stretch of the project has been a feat with the company literally disappearing behind me. Danièlle Allemand, the founder and brain behind the company is very advanced in her cancer and it all depends from her. Finding the molds, knowing where every negative comes from, techniques and recipes… I need some time but I want to make a small publication about it, about the loss of information embodied in a person, how when ones work is literally ones life, the body becomes the container of so much specific knowledge, impossible to transfer.

I managed to do the last piece of the project with the help of Karol my assistant. They had no tape, no bubble wrap, no pigments left… It was literally scraping the rests of the atelier into the pieces I produced. It has become very symbolic and not immediately visible in the pieces, but with some time and perspective I want to relate both narratives.

So the work is modular. In the pictures we see the two intervened pieces together, but I have several more horizontal walkboards for the installation format on every specific exhibition space. The pieces will interact with the limits of the exhibition space. The whole project started with the scaffolding being the only contribution by humans into the cave after 35.000 years, and this distance stays at the core of the work. That is to manifest tension between gravity and ingravity within the pieces.

The work relates to the contemporary exhibition space in two ways, one is taking its physical limits as inexistent, the installation is literally cut by the space but exceeds it, as if it was virtual or at least not as real and “time legitimized” as itself. Metaphorically it refers to the ultimate impossibility of representation. The real remains the real and any intent of capturing or synthetizing is lacking, so the work tries to react and add on it.

The pieces also state a contradiction where they rest on the floor or levitate, as they flirt with gravity. With the same aseptic distance they where first installed in 1994, they perform a magnetic negative reaction towards the floor.

The work is not about caves, nor companies or science it’s about human space/time scale as a measure to experience the world. Human expiration and industrial fragility coexist here.