2024, underpants, purple All Stars shoes, reinforced concrete, pigments, steel plate, MDF plate
L100 x D100 x H68 cm

The title of the work provides a great deal of information about the artist's intention, without closing the door to interpretation. After all, everyone will have their own experience of the work. The title is therefore a story in itself, albeit an incomplete one, for which I offer other keys to understanding, my own, without them having to become yours: it's the story of an observation at time T from perspective X of the apparent current impasse that is about to tip over. A thick societal body, fighting against itself and unable to see its imminent downfall, well that's just it. It can see it because it's tinkering around, avoiding the fall with a few tricks to feign stability, self-cheating again and again with other tricks, a patch here, a wedge there, but, in the end, this body does nothing to remedy the causes of its imminent fall, or rather, it believes it can do nothing. Let's look at this as a very global metaphorical image of our world, without taking anything away from the real one-off struggles, because they exist and so much the better. The intention is not to diminish them. This work speaks of complacency in powerlessness, perhaps of all those people who are not fighting. However, the aim is not to point the finger at the sleeping majority either, because I don't think it's a conscious choice, but rather a set of concomitant factors that annihilate the feeling of being able to act. 

According to Arendt, this intrinsically human freedom, political action, has been drastically reduced in modern times and, in today's liberal democracies, the dominant tendency is to equate freedom with a-politics, limiting it to the much more restricted circle of the private and the social, rather than to public and political life. Even what we now call 'public', as it appears in the media, is often reduced to the highlighting of private lives and celebrities, rather than a genuine space for public debate. This is where the notion of narcissism in the title of the work comes in. Insta has perfected the absence of debate already observed by Arendt in her time (the metal plate beneath the sculpture will probably be replaced by a reflective metal plate or mirror at a later date to accentuate this aspect, at the same time integrating viewers into the work through their reflection). The use of All Stars shoes (bought second-hand) completes the picture by underlining a little more the superficiality of our present world and the ever-renewed quest, unachievable as it is, for formal 'public' recognition of one's own existence through the artifices that communitise the isolation of individuals. Belonging to the circle of All Star owners as a palliative to participation in real political life, fuelled by the undisguised hope of becoming a Star oneself.

In this state of political immobility, where the absence - or at least the impression of the absence - of "the faculty of acting, which is the political faculty par excellence" (Hannah Arendt, Collective Responsibility, 1968) dominates, human beings become impoverished by themselves, in a vicious circle leading to the obstruction of public space, the space that reveals the humanity of the individual in the eyes of all and sets our society in motion, where "the major achievement of which man is capable" (Hannah Arendt, Condition of Modern Man, 1961-1983) is to be found. It is this political stagnation that this sculpture expresses, this self-blocking internal struggle that, as it stands, has no future other than a generalised breakdown. The whole, frozen in reinforced concrete, is not intended to come to life, and the use of this material brings the whole back into its context, that of a capitalism that can only profit from the general political stagnation.