Sac à merde sur lit d'argent (Shit bag on silver bed)
21/05/2021
2021, Domestic trousers, concrete, stainless steel hotel service trolley, stainless steel bars, spring clamps, L53 x D79 x H97.5 cm
This pair of concrete bollocks unable to support its own weight is what we've been fed for millennia in our patriarchal society. Proud, imposing, full of its own image, but also decadent and dependent on a bellboy to get around, assisted in one way or another by all of us in an endless cycle whose repetition must be broken.
Why concrete, you may ask? Well, first of all because it's a construction material, and with construction comes deconstruction, and since all social construction is collective, deconstruction has to be collective too.
What's more, although this material is solid, it is not durable (the life span of concrete produced today is estimated at 50 years, unlike concrete produced in antiquity). The use of this material therefore tends to emphasise this relative ephemerality, and thus to herald the end of male hegemony, which, like concrete, could well end up imploding through repeated infiltrations. The image of solidity conveyed by this material, just like that conveyed by patriarchy (because that's all we've ever known), is just a fragile illusion.
And finally, because concrete is the main building material of our time, on every continent, raising the question of its globality and omnipresence, just like the problem posed by patriarchy, but also because concrete is capitalism's 'weapon of mass construction' (see Anselm Jappe, Béton, arme de construction massive du capitalisme, 2020, L'échappée) and these two systems are self-sustaining: The first sets up social relations based on the exploitation of inequalities, including the exploitation of women, and the second provides the justification/legitimisation for them. As a complex interlocking social order, which contains within it relations of exploitation, domination and alienation, capitalism will never contribute to a reduction in the inequalities on which it depends. It is therefore completely illusory, even irrational, to think, or worse, to believe that fighting gender inequality is possible without simultaneously fighting capitalism and the other social relations that are intimately linked to it: racism and extractivism (which brings us back to concrete, since sand, an essential component in its manufacture, is the second most exploited natural resource in the world, after water).
In short, today's struggles are necessarily collective and intersectional, and far from hopeless.
As for the title, it's a play on words in French. Firstly, it sounds like the name of a dish in a chic restaurant, for example "poached egg on a bed of caviar", which is amplified by the use of the hotel service trolley, and secondly, the word "argent" (silver) here has a double function: it refers to the precious metal, the reflective surface beneath the sculpture, but it also refers to money, which in turn refers us to capitalism. In French, it's the same word.