CAMILLE GOUVINE

I'm interested in the anti-monument. Object of resistance against the architecture of the city, it opposes the "classical monuments", massive, colossal and which are intended to be timeless. The anti-monument is a spontaneous, ephemeral and mobile monument.

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City dwellers are the origin of hundreds, thousands, millions of traces that dress the city. In my opinion, these interventions are sometimes more representative of a given urban space than its architecture. I think that the city dweller is the first sculptor of the city, whether he intervenes temporarily or permanently in his territory. This work is feed by all these gestures and interventions.

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Diffusers for scooter, broken mirror, washbasin joint, all these objects in plaster are duplicates of the finds that dot the streets of Caen. Considered as debris, as waste they are also traces of the inhabitant, revealing life and many stories. Disseminated in many parts of the city, their sculpture in plaster became monuments in their own way. The final installation (in the exhibition space) traces their history, their journey, their various fittings of the public space.

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How does someone else enter a foreign city? Living in the center, walking through its streets, markets, tasting food, drinks, speaking the language, learning jokes, gossip, history, learning to respect culture. How do we make a foreign city its own? By not respecting culture, doing everything differently, gently, in a different way than that of taste or good manners, refusing to believe in the myths of the millennium, paying attention to everything that is fuzzy, stopping where the others accelerate, picking up what others throw, giving value to the nothing¹.

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1. Francis Alys, quote from the documentary film Wild details on the trace of Francis Alys  by Julien Devaux, 00:33:52.

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