On going project – Eggshell stickers and fadeproof marker
Chkondideli neighborhood
Rustavi, Georgia
October 3rd – October 11th 2013
Project curated by Tamara Bokuchava (www.socialphotocaucasus.org) and Nini Palavandishvili (www.geoair.blogspot.com) with the support of EU delegation to Georgia and Internews Georgia.
Based on the idea of a running frieze that would tie the neighborhood together, I painted each individual spot envisioning a design that would run from door to door. At first I thought we would ask the people and then paint, but actually the project turned out differently. The first door I decided to paint was the entrance of an abandoned house so we decided to paint it without asking permission. While I was painting this first door, locals who were passing by asked us what we were doing and started to spontaneously offer their own doors. At that point I decided that it would make more sense to just follow the flow of people offering their doors – that way I wouldn’t control the way the frieze was growing in and around the neighborhood.
Rustavi is the fourth largest city in Georgia. During the second half of the 20th century, the city was rebuilt by the Russians as an important industrial center with around 90 factories implanted on its territory. Chkondideli, the neighborhood where we worked, used to be a dormitory neighborhood for immigrants working at these factories. After 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, almost all the factories were closed down and the unemployment rate jumped to 65%. Today only two factories are still in use.
Process pictures (by Tamara Bokuchava):
Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.
July 31st – August 10th 2013
A project co-produced by Wooster Collective, Jonathan Levine Gallery, and Dumbo Art Festival.
6 m. x 45 m. – 20′ x 145′
In parallel with my participation in the Wooster Collective 10th Anniversary Show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery, I was invited to paint a huge mural on one of the side walls of the BQE in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
(Click on the picture to enlarge)
Thanks a lot for the great help from: Mike “Little Kang”, Hope, Matt, Sierra, Mariana, Leila & Brian, Laine, Corina, Russell, Joel & Brad, Theresa, Tara, Mary Kate & Fede, Kym, Kathryn Yerg, and the photographer Daniel Greenfeld.
Walk and Talk Azores, Public Art Festival
Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal
Portos dos Açores, Av. Kopke
July 12th – July 27th 2013
Thanks to everybody from W&T, people from Portos dos Açores and all the artists participating.
Via Matteo Renato Imbriani, Bari, Italy
July 1st – July 9th 2013
Commissioned by Dopplegaenger Gallery for the city of Bari
Thanks to everybody at Dopplegaenger Gallery: Antonella and Michele, Vittorio, Eugenio. The crane operators: Carlo and Giovani. And LUCE for the help!
Katowice Street Art Festival
Organized by the Culture Institution of Katowice
Katowice, Poland
April 17th – April 24th 2013
11 m. X 20 m. façade in Szopienice neighborhood.
Many thanks to the whole Katowice Street Art Festival crew and their amazing volunteers. Additional pictures by Bartek Barczyk.
4th Biennale d’Art Contemporain
Le Havre, France
September 28th 2012 – May 15th 2013
Directed by Linda Morren and curated by Kevin Grottaglia
I built the Signalétique Libre (free signage) installation exclusively for the Le Havre Contemporary Art Biennial. It will be exhibited on the Jules Ferry square until May 15th 2013.
My idea was to take advantage of the location, a wide open space and very transited – which means a significant pedestrian flow and enough wind – to do a mobile installation. The work was conceived around an idea I have already worked with several times: give the spectator, each time they see the artwork, the possibility to see new compositions. Signalétique Libre questions urban visual communication – very direct, concise and at times even alienating – concentrating in the same reduced space 20 signs with abstract designs, without any intelligible message, that remained in constant motion. The pedestrian is free to interpret what the signs want to communicate or indicate, an open space for the viewer to stop receiving messages and perhaps start to emit them.
Exterior pictures by Mikaël Lesueur
Thanks to Linda Morren, Kevin Grottaglia, Mikaël, Paul and all the crew at the Musée Maritime et Portuaire du Havre.
Parcours artistiques dans (et avec) l’espace public
Besançon, France
September 6th – October 6th 2012
Project in collaboration with MOMO
This summer MOMO and I were invited to do our fourth collaboration together for the Bien Urbain festival in Besançon, North-East of France. We worked on two exercises: the first one, called Improbables, was an exercise about doing compositions with pieces of wood in unused gaps in the city. The second one is called Peinture au Cordeau Traceur (Paint Snap-Line) and is an adaptation of the traditional chalk line tool. The technique we developed allowed us to trace long lines on a building of almost any height using paint instead of chalk.
Together with Bien Urbain, we edited a zine about these two projects:
www.justeici.bigcartel.com/product/momo-eltono-zine-poster.
We came up with this idea after noticing a lot of small, unused spaces on walls all around the city. After collecting scrap wood, we loaded up our cart with the wood and our tools. Then, as we walked around the city, we installed simple wooden compositions in every gap we found interesting. All the pieces were put into place using only tension – no nails nor glue were used. The end result were 52 installations found all around the “Battant” quarter in Besançon. On an individual level, the pieces were quite discreet and often looked like some cheap repair work; but when people started noticing the series, they immediately realized that something was happening… We were amazed by how intact the pieces remained and how slowly they disappeared. The hardest part of this project was to try to make the installations NOT look like pieces of art.
(Paint Snap-Line)
For this project, we used the traditional chalk line tracer tool as our inspiration and conducted experiments eventually developing a similar tool that enabled us to mark long straight lines on buildings with paint. After a few drawings, we came out with a design and using the material available to us in Bien Urbain’s basement, we built the artifact. We did three tests, threw paint everywhere and finally came up with a satisfactory result.
Pictures by Sierra, MOMO and Eltono.
Thanks to David, Lucile and to the whole Bien Urbain crew.
