Steps for Swinish multitude

(2023)

Multimedia installation. Plaster, inkjet print, slideshow projection, 152 x 115 x 170 cm. To watch the presentation video, follow the link below

The plaster cast of an "inviting tree" - wounded and polished by the regular friction of herds of wild boars - is associated with images: the one, printed and glued to the wall, of the Camden Bench (Factory Furniture Ltd, 2012), the famous bench of defensive design (anti-homeless, -skate, -display, -theft), and those projected on the wall of wild boars having just come to rub against the tree. Caught by a camera trap installed by the artist in 2021, these wild boars seem to take their ease in the exhibition space, marking their territory by rubbing, despite injunctions and prohibitions, with urban furniture of a certain hostility. .
"Swinish multitude" is an expression which since Edmond Burke assimilates the plebs and the socio-revolutionary forces to pigs (E. Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France, 1790), but which then designates "the assembly of “Humans and animals who resist in the middle of the street”: disobedient humans and animals “find themselves confused by this term within a common force of resistance” (F. Amir, Animal Revolts, 2022). Steps for swinish multitude is a first version of a sculpture project for the public space; the full-scale realization of the famous Camden bench in an eroded, hollowed-out version, transformed by animal activities.