"Vertical blocks"
Look out series
Outside template
Miriam Laura Leonardi (born in 1985, lives and works in Zurich)
Jacky Poloni (born in 1989, lives and works in Zurich)
Julia Znoj (born in 1990, lives and works in Zurich and Vienna)
The starting point for the collaborations between these three artists is a common interest in linguistic and narrative structures and memorized gestures, engraved forever in their memories. By confronting these internalized images in incongruous places, the artists tell phantasmagorical stories.
For the 2015 edition of the Habitacle/Meudon project at the Villa Bloc, they chose to create their "vertical block" installation in the ruined house at the bottom of the garden. A few relics remind us that this place was once André Bloc's workshop. The installation is a proposal for architectural renewal, a timeloop, a time loop, the projection of a past into a hypothetical future. The intention of the artists is to show how the place is apprehended by the visitor in the space-time, how the meaning hosts transformed and distorted reverberations. We walk in a sphere of ever-present ghosts.
For the installation Gabarit extérieur (2015), the old windows of the ruined workshop have been replaced by domes that usually serve as roof dormers. From the outside, the workshop appears covered with pustules, all swollen, like a series of pregnant women's bellies. Once inside, one feels enclosed by the opacity of the impossible windows. The volumes of the domes become spaces in themselves, shelters for shadows and dead leaves, dead ends for the eye.
The installation Look out series (2015) consists of two autonomous wooden staircases, placed in the house in twisted angles and held by mooring straps. These stairs do not furnish the space and lead nowhere. Their arrangement invites to sit down and enjoy the installation. But, again, the windows block the view rather than carry it away. Placed in the middle of the ruined workshop, they are the agents of a crossroads or a permanent construction site of points of view.