Singularities series

01/02/2021
Singularity I / Singularité I
1st February 2021, wine glass, rubber band
L11 x D11.5 x H16 cm
 
Singularity II / Singularité II
1st February 2021, beer mug, rubber band
L12.5 x D9 x H14.5 cm
 
Singularity III / Singularité III
2nd august 2022, wine glass, rubber band
L-variable x D-variable x H10,8 cm
 
This work was originally born of a fortuitous conjecture of events, or, in other words, a coincidence, that of a glass that suddenly shatters in such an unexpected way that the incident stands out. It breaks the time continuum at a moment X. A bit like a photograph that captures light at a given moment. Perhaps that's what these objects are too, actors-witnesses to a moment frozen in time.

This unexpected break, this singularity, is the irruption of the politics in the policymaking, this emergence of the political fact beyond the monotonous government management. It's the Gilets jaunes, the strike movements, the citizen mobilisations, the struggles for the climate, against racism, the feminist movements, and so on. If " human beings are political animals", as Aristotle said, then it is in these events that they realise themselves. This unusual break is a symbol of this, similar but unique each time. 

Today's policymaking, and more generally today's society, far from prolonging man's natural inclination to be a sociable and social individual, i.e. political, has detached itself from what drives us and tends to mould us to its own needs, not ours, malleable, individualistic beings, incapable of resisting it, of organising ourselves outside it. Divide and conquer is the motto, but its injections of the norm are always and always met with the unexpected. History is full of singularities and, without them, we wouldn't have got very far. Policymaking systematically and unsurprisingly fails in the face of a nature that seems indomitable. This is what the broken rubber band symbolises, failure, a botched attempt to contain the whole, to normalise singularity, by force. But time takes its toll, the rubber band weakens and eventually breaks.

This is the process described by these narrative objects, symbols of the cleavage between politics and policymaking, between what we are and what they would like us to be.
And even if time were to do nothing about it, i.e. if the elastic didn't break, the break would remain clearly visible.

As for the use of wine glasses or beer mugs, it's towards the supposed conviviality of these tools for sharing, creating links and discussing that we should be looking (and it's no coincidence that I've decided to publish this work now, when the boots of the far right are impatiently pounding the hot tarmac, 2024-06-20).