December 2012 > Billboarders, Graphéine Festival, Art Plateform of Muret, France.

In Novem­ber 2012, as part of a con­tem­por­ary draw­ing fest­iv­al in Toulouse called Graphéine, we oc­cu­pied the space provided by the Art de Muret Plat­form. This ex­hib­i­tion al­lowed us to present a first step in our re­search for our project in Greece.

Our aim was not to de­scribe or de­vel­op pre­cisely our fu­ture pos­sible in­ter­ven­tions, but rather to give a fic­tion­al ap­proach to a project that os­cil­lates between real­ity, prob­ab­il­ity, and uto­pia. In this pro­cess, we presen­ted two series of draw­ings: maps, sketches, graph­ic nov­els whose fi­nal as­pects were vol­un­tar­ily un­defined, mak­ing way for free in­ter­pret­a­tion.

This ex­hib­i­tion was also an op­por­tun­ity to re­flect on ways of pro­duc­tion ad­ap­ted to the spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­ist­ics of bill­boards, either be­cause of their mo­nu­ment­al size or their im­plant­a­tion. So, part of the pre­par­a­tion for the ex­hib­i­tion was ded­ic­ated to con­ceiv­ing large-scale draw­ing tools such as ink stamps, screen rollers, tele­scop­ic poles for paint cans and to the ap­pro­pri­ation of every­day ob­jects like garden va­por­izers or fire ex­tin­guish­ers to rap­idly cov­er large sur­faces.

The ex­hib­i­tion space we were giv­en al­lowed us to at­tempt full-scale ex­per­i­ment­a­tion with these tools. Con­se­quently, the pub­lic was con­fron­ted to a mo­nu­ment­al draw­ing, typ­ic­ally in­ten­ded for far-away view­ing, without the pos­sib­il­ity to step back in the ex­hib­i­tion space. (Mur­al size : 13 x 4 m).

The mur­al’s con­cep­tion made it pos­sible for our ima­gin­a­tion to merge with his­tor­ic­al ele­ments linked to the cur­rent situ­ation in Greece, like these un­ex­plained col­lect­ive phe­nom­ena. The word Tan­zwut refers to a his­tor­ic­al phe­no­men­on, a col­lect­ive trance that happened in the city of Stras­bourg in 1518. A part of the loc­al pop­u­la­tion star­ted dan­cing fren­et­ic­ally for months, some to the point of dy­ing of ex­haus­tion. The causes of this hys­ter­ia still re­main hazy, the most likely hy­po­thes­is be­ing that ex­treme so­cial con­di­tions (threats of in­va­sion, fam­ines, epi­dem­ics, pre­cari­ous life con­di­tions) pro­voked a form of col­lect­ive psy­chos­is.

On this sub­ject, an on­line art­icle is ac­cess­ible for con­sul­ta­tion on the Art­icle 11 news­pa­per web­site, ‘1518, Stras­bourg entre dans la danse…’ dat­ing back to Decem­ber 5, 2012.