City of strangers

intallation and online animation, group show hospitality: city of strangers, at Tulca, season of visual arts, November 2007, Galway, Ireland.


I was invited by Tulca to spend the October month at Aras Eanna, art and culture center of Inis Oìrr, smallest and most eastern of the Three Aran Islands in Galway Bay. The idea was to create a little web object for TULCA 2007. This year, the Tulca theme was hospitality: city of strangers, so it's very naturally that I came up to thisCity of strangers passing trough my
monster-maker brain, taking place on the wild cyberspace with roots firmly deep set in the Irish landscape.

I must say, it was not difficult to put myself in a "stranger mood" in Inis Oìrr, at first cause I am, indeed, a stranger on the island, and at second, cause every thing seems pretty much stranger to me: the wind inviting itself in my house all day long, knocking at the door and singing around, the stones walls in which I got lost almost every single day (cause I was trying with my little daughter to reach the see by some non official paths—we both love adventures), the neighbor and his dog, working on the field following a specific plan known only by him, plan properly abstract and bizarre to me (today, the blue bucket should be vertical, this 3 stones here must stand on a line on the old oil barrel)... Stranger as well were for me the religious skin of the land, or the form of the traditional boats "currach", like curious black slugs hanging up along the beach, or in a more abstract way the tormented link of the Irish identity with the colonial England, (as a "Frenchie" with heavy colonial past, I never explore that feeling from inside), etc. So I collect on my way all this islander figures, and draw them on my doodles book. But you can not be a stranger if you stand on stage by your own, you need at last to be two, so I associate all my new monsters in pair to see how they will react together.

look at the online animation : cityofstrangers.org



more info about Tulca 2007 www.myspace.com/tulca
about Tulca season of visual arts in Galway: www.tulca.ie



exhibition views:

















some of the doodles: the islander



my daughter and ipod' fight



dog on shore


breakfast


rain or love / is anybody here ?



oil spill traction pump / studies on mars



stonewall monster / England invasion



the neighbor is a strange man / the priest



the neighbor is a strange man / the priest







some views of the island of Inis Oirr:


















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