The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM MANY WALKS OF LIFE
Stéphane Magnin
Live In Your Head
2017, 90 cm x 40 cm
Forged steel, copper, marbles, synthetic hair
The work of Stéphane Magnin generates statements and prototypes rather than works of art; the undisciplined and unlimited objects of his work exceed the constraints of art, and combine popular culture (meeting places, habitats, advertisements, clothing, furniture...) and academic culture (archives of utopian architecture, community and environmental theory…). Deeply fond of participatory practices and circular economies, he conjures social networks and taxonomies to create a poetic mode: Hyperion, Libertronaut, OPIDRO from the lands of heros, Th8nkosmos. Live In Your Head feeds his hope to see the creation of a city assembled by its inhabitants, that would rely on making and know-how, a city where one would not confuse technological performance with handwork: the ideal city. It is the user that one must study: “the same house with two different users requires solutions other than the container.” His response is a mask or rather a face, “derived from a copper cauldron, roughly formed by stepping on it and then adjusted with a hammer,” which recalls the forgotten subtitle of Harald Szeeman’s exhibition: “When attitudes become form.” “Will I become the hero of my own history or will someone else take this place?” seems to be the program that he proposes to the partners and visitors to the exhibition.