ARTIST STATEMENT
<i>United Land</i> series - 2010-2013
United Land is a global photographic and plastic project which explores the notions of territoriality and the psychoses of man faced with the potential disappearance of his vital spaces.
Human beings, in perpetual quest for control of their living environment, have recently found themselves faced with the question of the temporality of human existence and the hypothesis of an abrupt or gradual cessation of life on earth.
We live our times with the conscious or unconscious idea of long-term insecurity, hence a difficulty in projecting ourselves into the future. This produces an acceleration of lifestyles and the palliative frenzy of building urgently and on a massive scale.
Our postmodern society is defined by a fragmentation and disintegration of the values of progress as a general and unifying idea leading to an awareness of the problems of socio-economic and environmental deregulation. The paradigm of productivism has made us aware of the fragility of our physical and psychological living space.
United Land is a moment where activity and movement are stopped and human work becomes subject to reflection through utopian underwater landscapes definitively frozen from any influence except that of marine erosion.
Symbol of man's loss of control over his environment, water becomes a regulatory vector by taking over the entire human environment; following a hypothetical melting of the ice. Through this immersion, the notion of human and political territorial belonging loses its meaning and becomes an abstract notion. United Land claims only as longitudes/latitudes, without affiliation to any geopolitical identity or any real possibility of geographic location.
The project, without claiming an ecological discourse, questions the capacity of man to conceive of his existence in an adaptive and non-appropriative form or how to question the precepts of the functioning of contemporary society.
<i>Inversion of United Land Pole / Project </i>
IP United Land is a series of photographic montages around the world, in resonance with the scientific theory of the reversal of the planet's magnetic poles. The project is structured around the “Survival Map”, a Survival map representing planet Earth with a sea level 300m higher than in 2012, the date the map was created.
Each monument, construction, building, natural element, exceeding the height of 300m is represented by a symbol and guides the photographic mapping of the Pole Inversion project.
The theory of pole inversion, quite recent, is no longer questionable from a scientific point of view since it has been proven, but its precise origins and what it can potentially result in gives rise to several very different.
It has been discovered in the geological analysis of the planet's volcanic rocks, in particular, that at different times in the history of the earth, reversals of magnetic poles of varying length have taken place. Two opposing points of view exist on the origin of these inversions: the first is a significant meteorite-type shock, the second is due to the bubbling of magma from the heart of the planet which could produce random magnetic fluxes capable of reversing the poles.
The current poles move regularly from their reference points, but it is absolutely impossible to predict today when a
possible reversal could take place in the future.
IP United Land is a fictional research based on the theories of certain researchers, on one of the consequences of a pole inversion of a fairly long duration and the starting point of the United Land project.
In the event of an inversion, there would be a massive movement of sea currents and the loss of stability of the ice sheet which would move from North to South and from South to North; this quantity of moving ice would gradually melt and produce a rapid and regular rise in water levels.
The project depicts a fantasized image of this situation of glacial movement by confronting it with our architecture by increasing the current sea level by 300 meters; it is a T moment in the middle of an uncontrollable and random terrestrial process.
<i>28th Parallel </i> series - 2006-2012
The 28th parallel project is a photographic and plastic research on the different conspiracy theories' representations.
A fictional exploration of boundaries of reality as information falsified by an over-mediated society.
The contemporary multi support image produced by engeneering propaganda defines what is right above any intellectual or instinctive search.
In the 28th parallel, 5 ENA graduated above laws and geopolitical borders control the planet using the modern media's panel and image sublimation.
These five apparently identical people called "sources" influence and guide political choices, define the global international rules to be applied and influence the lives of all individuals.
A new politico-spiritual order called "the guides" made up of electrons is created with the aim of a reappropriation of the planet by its inhabitants.
In a symbolic and phantasmagorical representation, these ghostly guides the system's faults and penetrate through their precept of functioning and autonomous thought the international propaganda network.
Their route inevitably leads them to the five sources.
Through this allegory and this fiction, the 28th parallel approaches the modern systems of manipulation of populations, in line with the science fiction works by Philip K. Dick or George Orwell, in a well-established reality and not far from the philosophy our contemporary area.
<i> Ice Clock </i>
Cooling unit, 3d printing stainless steel, 3d epoxy printing
160x35cm - 2016
ICE CLOCK is a series of installations-sculptures combining 3d creation and refrigerating technology in an autonomous system of random creation / destruction of icebergs. The iceberg suspended under a glass bell partly melts and is reconstituted cyclically, flooding part of an artificial landscape supporting the room.
The sculptures modify their forms and appearances according to the time of day, the season and the conditions of temperature and hydrometry, and develop phases of condensation, fog, or flooding; which makes the project continuously changing and alive.
ICE CLOCK, in line with the United Land project, representing the planet covered by water and ice, is a phantasmagorical allegory of the ambivalent situation of contemporary man in his environment and of his ambiguous vision of the relationship between nature and progress. Here the iceberg shows more than a visible fragment but its hidden face, its dark side, in a realistic perspective of irremediable melting despite artificial technological infusions supporting an ambitious hypothesis of equilibrium.
These majestic ephemeral mountains of ice are the ether of the impossibility of control of the elements present under the wear of time, and irreparably symbolize the disappearance, or for an enlightened mind, the transformation from one form to another in a spirit of cyclic rotation.
POINT OF VIEW
<i> In the blue hour of a counter-utopia </i>
The works which give themselves the ambition of a globalizing societal project are not so numerous, especially when they are based on scientific presuppositions.
François Ronsiaux, who attaches himself to a monumental vision of urban sites, develops his project United Land for several years. This gave rise to several interpretations, including that of the in situ nocturnal projections of Paris Underwater taken in the 20th arrondissement of the capital for the Nuit Blanche 2015. But its final version is a set of photographs taken in a predominantly bluish color. If blue light is mainly emitted by the sun, it is increasingly so, indoors, by the proliferation of artificial light sources: halogen lighting, LEDs, computer screens and smartphones. This aesthetic choice also has the merit of linking these images to the question of the onset of sleep or rather of its prevention since it has been proven that blue light "deludes the brain" by emitting the same wavelengths as the sun during the day. It thus disturbs the role of melatonin, this natural hormone produced at the end of the day and which promotes sleep. Symbolically, the announcement of this blue hour of a humanity anesthetized by its technologies prepares the ground for an upheaval of the territories of life.
One can precisely define utopia in terms of "imaginary territory, perfectly organized where there is harmony between the inhabitants; we know that, by extension, it constitutes itself as a model for an audacious and ideal revolutionary project". Oscar Wilde affirmed its primordial character : "No map of the world is worthy of a look if the country of utopia is not included". One of the physical forms often used to materialize it is the island. We can see the foundation of this in Thomas More's Utopia, his island, difficult to access, is made up of XNUMX fortified cities, rigorously identical : "Whoever knows this city knows them all, because they are all exactly the same, as much as the nature of the place allows it". This insular and serial character finds an heir in Philippe Calandre's works, such as Isola Nova (XNUMX) as well as in the suites of this general architectural and rural project.
In 1952, the Luxembourg artist Bert Theis (2016-2014) produced a series of large-format photomontages based on aerial views of the cities of Milan, Munich, Paris, Tirana and Turin, where nature invades all urban spaces to turn them into a kind of "urban jungle". He wrote : "Proposed as a counterpoint to the urban transformation processes and the real estate speculation operations that accompany them, these "agglovilles" (city clusters) intend to demonstrate that another city is possible, because its image is possible. ».
The proof by the image, its demonstrative role, is also what guides François Ronsiaux's artistic production. The general purpose is more akin to dystopia, which consists in "projecting, as opposed to utopia, what the author fears rather than what he wants". Today, dystopia is above all a literary genre, a subfield of science fiction that also inspires visual artists to project into a future from an undesirable present. "Both test the limits of reality, utopia approaches an ideal that it rarely achieves - stopped by the real world - and dystopia makes visible different breaking points and vulnerabilities" Michael D. GORDIN, Helen TILLEY and Gyan PRAKASH, in Utopia / Dystopia : conditions of historical possibility.
Both are considering globalizing solutions. Thus we can see in United land the double heritage of two series of the Florentine group of radical architects reunited under the Superstudio label. The general ambition would rather be allegiance to the continuous Monument presented by the group in XNUMX, which was intended to be "an architectural model for total urbanization". They declared that "architecture is one of the few ways to make the cosmic order visible on earth". This order or rather this cosmic disorder Ronsiaux considers as the possible continuation of a geomagnetic apocalypse with reference to the scientific theory of the inversion of the planet's magnetic poles. The project is based on the "Survival Map", a Survival Map representing the planet earth with a sea level more than XNUMXm higher. Due to man's loss of control over his environment, water becomes a vector levelling the entire human environment following a feared global melting of the ice. The project's predecessor can be seen in the series Rescue of Italian Historic Centers created in XNUMX by Superstudio following the earthquakes and floods that devastated Florence and Venice. "Man now has no science other than that of his own destruction. The city is now submerged by the now contaminated river of history, which has been transformed into a tide of waste water. »
Nicolas Moulin claimed the influence of the Florentines which allows us to locate United Land within a (restricted) family of creators, linked to groups like VIDERPARIS (2001) or INTERLICHTENSTADT (2009) which also showcase new forms of monuments. These artists
share the desire to work in a logic crossing their different serial proposals. François Ronsiaux's photomontages are divided between two colorful universes, although blue light is dominant, certain scenes are marked by a colder atmosphere evoking icy situations. In 2016, his more sculptural works of Ice Clock are made up of a “Refrigeration unit, and 3D printing in stainless steel and 3D printing on epoxy”. The iceberg suspended under a glass bell partially melts and reconstitutes itself cyclically, flooding part of an artificial landscape supporting the piece.
These different states of ecological concern about territories of human survival lead to the creation of what Michel Lussault calls Hyper-Lieux in his essay subtitled The new geographies of globalization (Seuil 2017). He links them to these particular climatic phenomena where events take place, he notes about them : "The contemporary world is increasingly marked by the importance taken by the spatial imagination of the disaster." Because the term dystopia, which materializes these collective psychoses, is unfamiliar to a wide audience, one may prefer its synonym of counter-utopia. United land attempts an ironic approach to this globalization with a series of flags customized to the United Nation’s disaster blue.
Christian Gattinoni