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Produced for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, the architectural model “Cyclo City” focuses on the railway
site in the city of Nancy, which repeatedly appears in Bertrand Lamarche’s work in its
twofold aspect. On the one hand, the model pays attention to urban reality and its surroundings,
in both their architectural and cultural dimensions. On the other hand, it breaks up this
reality into fictional elements, that the artist then puts together and takes apart, as in a
scenario.
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Seen from the Kennedy viaduct, this head-on panoramic view shows a reality that has been partially erased, exposing the urban gap left after the disappearance of the prison and the destruction of a portion of the Centre de tri Postal (the mail sorting center) built by Jean and Claude Prouvé. What thus appears is an emblematic case of the expressive dimension pertaining to a particular conception of architecture around 1968-73, an intrinsically precarious architecture, marked out for dismantling. | ||
This modeling also exceeds the referral to an outside
reality, it integrates fictional features of Bertrand Lamarche’s universe such
as a lighthouse, a future location for a garden of hogweeds, a transparent plastic tube in front of the mail
sorting center. resembling a “wormhole” in the midst of urban space, this rotating tunnel
functions both as an optical instrument and as a time-loop right out of science fiction.
Its transparent surfaces, projected onto a backdrop by means of a camcorder and a video
projector, alter reality, translate it into a different spatial and time scale. the projection operates
as a machine for fictionalizing reality.
Light, tunnels, rotating cycles, slow motion, models and fog are all part of Bertrand Lamarche’s laboratory of obsessions. they continually transmute throughout his installations, projections, videos and sculptures. the resulting works expose themselves less as time-fixed objects than as occurrences that play and replay movement, temporality, and artificiality of the visible. |
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2012 - CYCLOCITY
