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Venue
Teloglion Foundation of Art / Thessaloniki French Institute / Museum of Byzantine Culture
Artist
Jean Francois Bocle
 Artists's biography |
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The Boat, installation, 2007 |
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Everything Must Go, installation, 2007 |
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Everything Must Go, installation, 2007 |
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The Boat, installation, 2007 |
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Everything Must Go/Boat
The work of Jean-François Boclé is polysemic – one might even say polyphonic. His discourse is a form of self-enunciation, self-exposure. It is like the cry of Everything must go! – so forceful as to annihilate space and create a sense of vertigo. The plastic bags full of air create a void in which – like others before us – we are close to drowning. (1) ‘I come from an American society, Caribbean, criss-crossed by the ideologies of race and slavery. The first European vessels to cross the Atlantic initiated the murderous encounter of the three continents – America, Africa and Europe’. (2) The installations Boat and Everything must go! evoke the memory of millions of human beings cast into the depths during the long transatlantic voyage, or sold as commodities and now erased from history. The immediacy of this evocation coincides with a highly contemporary image of our own societies. These plastic bags, or these symbols ripped from packing cases, ‘objects evoking both exchange and loss, form the archaeology of a mercantile present, summoning up those herded together in sorting centres, tied to airplane seats in planes about to take off, clandestine and erased, defeated by voyages and shipwrecks’. (2)
1. Odile Biec, catalogue [Outre-Mémoire, Le Parvis, 2005
2. Jean-François Boclé
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