Florent Meng

Florent Meng

Work from Wanderer’s Sculptures.

“The Sculptures of the Walker represent a photographic suite presented as digital prints and published in a set of 12 booklets. The images are meant as short sequences circling around their subjects. They indeed propose several viewpoints of undefined places and objects occupying a position of transitional disuse. These forms as close to sculpture as to the photographic subject are registered in the course of long walks. They thus involve an extrapolation of the concept of sculpture, beginning with the subject, the city, precisely an object or architecture, which is extracted and registered by the photographic eye. Differing from the usual one-shot viewpoint, the photo-set tends to shape the sculpture of the walker, while giving several viewpoints it is creating a sculpture in the round, the camera thus replacing the hand or tool. Also, this project of “democratic walking” tends to define the urban space as studio space. According to Michel de Certeau, walking is connected to the urban environment in terms of enunciation: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the act of speech is to language or to the statements uttered.“. Following this idea, we can further consider the “sculptures of the walker” as an enunication, a language, a disclosure related to the system of walking and to the urban system. Moreover, it is essential to consider here the notion of encounter, as a non-intervention turning photography into a simple mean to frame and preserve a “given piece”, turning it into a conspicuous sculpture. In this project, the image builts itself in a whole. A urban still-life, uncluttered fossil, the autonomous image defines itself among its whole, as observation element. This whole suggests a past or future movement, setting the issue of the context surrounding the subject, that is, the sculptural space.Through a resonance set, these photographs of objects involve the imagination of the viewer, as possibilities of mental sculpture. ” – Julia Guillon, 2010