In conversation

Christine Jamart (l'art même)

AM: What is the significance of working collectively with giants and their respective communities in this particular context of the Biennale di Venezia?

PG: The question of giants comes from popular culture. As such, they are here not so much for their artistic value, but for the questions they raise. This is what concerns us and brings us together here.

Pℊ: Importing a subject linked to popular culture into the Biennale is a conscious choice. That being said, each of us has worked closely with this form of culture for a long time. It’s an intrinsic part of the way we position ourselves. Then, obviously, arriving in Venezia with a project like this permits us to question the format of the Biennale. Very quickly, with the giants, the question of scale, including the one measuring the gap between popular and so-called elitist cultures, a question present for a long time in each of us and in our respective disciplines, posed itself.

℘ℊ: We’re aware that the perspective we bring on popular culture and folklore differs from the one we usually see in contemporary art, a perspective far from any judgement, or even cynicism.

Pℊ: It’s also an opportunity to ask questions about what we consider as falling under the heading of ‘art’, how we position ourselves and above all how to operate in parallel with these communities. We’re creating a story with them; together we’re constructing a scenario for which Venezia is only a stage in the process. How we travel down there, how we cross the Alps, how we slow down this journey, how it is broken down into stages. 

℘G: Giants, more than any other object of popular culture, take us into a story not only of scale, as has been said, but into a story of bodies, of customs linking us to others, to communities, to ways of organising ourselves. With questions of know-how and craftsmanship that have long existed but are being transformed and adjusted.

pℊ: A technology that is at once very crude and at the same time highly refined. The two scales exist side by side.

AM: The physical scale plays on contrasts: the very particular landscape setting of Resia, one stage in the giants’ journey to Venezia, makes them surprisingly small, while the architectural setting of the pavilion accentuates their gigantism. But if we’re talking of scale, we’re talking of vantage point. Are not these changes in vantage point central to your project? On the other hand, what do these co-created stories tell us about our contemporary world?

Pℊ: The fact that giants are tools operating within very local communities, anchored in their territories, in their villages, sometimes in a particular neighbourhood, tools co-created by members of these communities, truly motivated our interest. The vantage point you speak of allows one to look at the way these objects contribute to fostering imagination in communities and very localised governance, born of and nourished by specific places. And that’s something very present-day!

AM: Are there modes of governance that seem instructive to you, pointing to other ways in which society can function?

Pℊ: The idea is not to create new and globally applicable models, but to go looking to discover differences. It’s holding up a prism through which we view the worlds around us.

℘ℊ: The scenario is also nourished by the act of moving people and objects from place to place. Moving giants means setting groups of people in motion, bringing together several essential items that have taken shape very locally, coming together first in the Alps before moving into the pavilion. The multiple logistics of travel gradually create a kaleidoscopic vision of the complexity of the world in which we live today.

pℊ: We can say that this work is ‘agential’, to use a term applied to contemporary art. Agential in a much more articulated ecosystem than the one we are in, in a certain sense. This is one way of seeing things, but we can see the number of 800,000 visitors expected at the Biennale as smaller than the sum of all the spectators at all the activities of the giants that they would be participating in if they were not at the Biennale. Despite its aura, the Biennale is only a small and far from dominant event. There are many giants we couldn’t have brought with us because of more important rendezvous on their agendas. It’s therefore very much an agential minority.

PG: To put it another way, when we talk about scale, apart from the obvious correlation to one or the other giant, we are talking above all about the community that has created it. We move the giants, grouping them and creating new situations to generate stories driven by a scenario, the unfolding of which we do not yet know. Each situation creates a different narrative.

℘G: The scale is the frame, while the vantage point invites each individual to act in a particular way. This relationship to the scenario can only come about through the setting in motion of a set of actors, of people, their encounters and their ongoing writing. A vantage point expressed when these ingredients come together, as during the festive picnic in Resia on 9 March. It’s the relationship between us, the others, the visitors, with these objects that we install that produces the work, if we can call it that. Or the story.

PG: As with music – also present in the project – which acts differently depending on the place, we produce elements that act in real-life situations, as in and as extensions of the giants’ home communities.

℘ℊ: The idea of vantage point is interesting...We have reflected a lot on the concept of representation and its distance from reality. The 1:1 scale, as Stephen Wright says, is all about avoiding the stage of representation. 

Pℊ: Offering an experience, reducing the distance between those producing the artistic thing and those observing it. We position ourselves as ingesting the context.

AM: Like the earthworm, emblematic of the Denicolai & Provoost duo...

Pℊ: Yes, very much so. It’s the experience of ingestion and digestion. We invite spectators to be active players when experiencing the scenario.

AM: In the pavilion, the vantage point is doubly reversed, with visitors being invited to dance under the giants.

PG: Successfully getting the giants to dance there was the starting point of this scenography. The copyshop that we offer in the pavilion is also something of real life. The flag-tablecloth-curtain and all the objects in the scenario are scaled to the realities they have encountered, changing shape with the changes in contexts. There is no representation, no modelling, no reductions.

AM: Does your project seek to project a geopolitical dimension, in line with the Biennale’s theme Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere and with its numerous national representations offering more and more multiculturalism? In other words, can the hyper-local echo today’s global? Does glocal, a very fashionable contraction some 20 years ago, relate in any way to your project?

PG: Territorial borders, just like administrative boundaries, create artificial limits in the landscape. Obviously, by focusing on independent forms of governance, we question the porosity of borders, a fairly central issue in ℘ℊ. It’s not insignificant that we ended up in Resia, close to three borders, Swiss, Austrian, Italian, a place that has in the past been administratively dependent on each of these countries. We are very interested in these frictions and, if we are here, it’s to talk about them. Likewise, if we work with cartography, we do so in order to question the way of representing these spaces, which becomes a vantage point on the world that affects the way we perceive them. The fact of acting in real-life mode also rebalances these things a little. Finding oneself not in an attempt to represent the territory but in the territory itself.

℘G: More than how to make giants dance in a fixed place, this, the questioning of territory, is the starting point. How do we break down the walls of this micro-entity in the Giardini as others have done before us.

pℊ: Geology and geological relief, even more than geopolitics, impose their laws on us. It’s no coincidence that the places of passage, such as mountain passes, they require us to find are disputed places, places of friction.

Pℊ: The question of going beyond national borders guided us in the choice of giants, who also come from France and the Basque Country in Spain...We have intentionally not confined ourselves to Belgian giants, whose culture, incidentally, is also profoundly cross-border.

AM: What we have here is a veritable personification of the giants.

pℊ: Even though inanimate, they are subject to identification processes much more than simple artefacts. They are real projection-producing machines!

PG: Every week, a number of giants are born. They are fragile, collapse, marry, reproduce in different versions, last, are stillborn. They are vectors in their communities and the manner of building them varies enormously. Their life-creating dimension is, for us, the major factor. It’s this aspect that guided our choice of them.

AM: You say you act against the ‘stigma’ of individual-based artistic practice. The expression is particularly strong...

Pℊ & ℘ℊ: Wherever we are named, only the visual artist duo Denicolai & Provoost is mentioned. We have always insisted that there are seven of us and that we work together. Working collectively is a position we share politically.

℘G: We express the desire to move away from the labels people attach to our professions and to exhibit plurality in each of our practices. All of us do this already, both personally and as a collective. A fortiori, in a project of this scale, everyone is obliged to activate diverse potentials to make it come about as a joint effort. The sacred image of artist and curator still remains today but, in fact, the reality is quite different.

AM: In other words, it’s not so much the cumulation of various professional profiles – artists, curators, architects, graphic designers, typographers – as the fact that each of you wears several hats.

PG: What we say about the way we implement the project also applies to the way we work among ourselves. For example, when we speak of our common desire not to adopt top-down positions in our daily practice, like breaking away from the traditional relationship between a ‘senior’ position like that of an architect and a ‘lower’ one like that of an engineer. We work collectively based on the idea of permitting ourselves to teach one another. We exemplify on a small scale what we produce on a large scale.

Pℊ: To act collectively is to resist a hyper-capitalist and individualised world. Seizing the opportunity of an artistic project in Venezia to make connections. 

PG: To act collectively is also to demonstrate the level of complexity of an undertaking like this. To place the performing artist’s name at the top of a theatre bill is to commit an untruth. We have the capacity to act on the order of our public contract and in the context of the Biennale precisely because we act collectively. For this type of event, it’s normal that it’s the project that is selected. The problem lies in putting individual names to it. If we were to support the individuals-based model, if we were to resort to a committee, which is kept in the dark as to what the artist plans to put in place, we would be playing into the hands of individualism.

Pℊ: Here, the entire project was born from partnering. If the figure of the individual artist were not so central in a certain art world, the question of competition, particularly in a context like that of Venezia, would not arise so strongly.

PG: The collective allows us to de-specialise, to change our vantage points via the experiments we carry out together. When we talk of opening a space of freedom for the expression of the scenario, what we are trying to say is that the process counts more than the result.

AM: Petticoat Government of course refers to the physiognomy of the giant but has a clearly feminist connotation.

Pℊ: Yes, a ‘petticoat government’ allows us to envisage possible overthrows of the patriarchy.

℘ℊ: From a phonetic point of view, we like the fact of starting with petti in a project where we work with giants and on scales. As in the story of the Trojan Horse, we give a voice to an empty form...

℘G: Designed for the 350th anniversary of the city of Charleroi, the giant Julia compensates for the lack of female and worker representation, just as Babette in Tourcoing embodies the female textile worker. These models are transforming and integrating increasing numbers of women who are the bearers of ideas that shake up existing models. The evolution of this popular culture interests us. Giants can be linked to causes, such as the environment or feminism, or social issues, which are also those raised by contemporary art.

AM: This question of inclusiveness and feminism is clearly asserted by the typography. Where does it originate?

pℊ: The typography is by Chrystel Crickx who, in her Publi Fluor shop in Schaerbeek, produced a place of resistance to computerisation; in 2000, when the shop closed down, Spec uloos bought its stock of letters cut from adhesive vinyl between 1975 and 2000 for local signage and advertising uses, vectorised the fonts and ordered lowercase letters from it that Chrystel designed free style, in a sort of psychedelic aesthetic, which is the one selected for Petticoat Government. This archive raises eminently contemporary issues: economy of means (production and alternative means of dissemination), local practices (craftsmanship, self-teaching and vernacular amateurism-professionalism), proximity to and distance from the machine, property and authorship.

AM: Who are the contributors to the catalogue?

PG: They appeared during the numerous meetings we organised and took part in. For example, with Alexis Zimmer, who works on practices of collecting and preserving intestinal microbiota, we approach the fact of looking at something from below, of considering the digestive tract as the first brain, as something inhabited by foreign bodies and that creates our identity, both contextual and biological. It’s a kind of reversal that says that each of us is not a pure body but rather a body composed of a multitude of other bodies that tie us into a context.

Pℊ: Our selection also includes invitations to anthropologists like Silvia Mesturini Cappo, whose research focuses on the arts in combat against contemporary forms of extraction, colonisation and destruction of (bio)diversity. In this way she links to Émilie Hache’s book De la génération (2024), which focuses on practices based on generation, in opposition to production.

℘G: We also include Stephen Wright, who approaches artistic practices on a 1:1 scale. The meeting with him was triggered by the question posed by some of us as to what a work of art is – a question that, even if we didn’t really pose it collectively, necessarily underlies what we do. For us, Wright answers in a clear and pedagogical way, as well as tackling the question of the perception of art in the contemporary world and how each era reinvents its way of viewing what artwork is.

Pℊ: Then eli lebailly, an anthropologist, photographer, sound producer and walker, and Maximilien Atangana, a poet, storyteller and percussionist, whose interactive public performance, combining recitation, music and dance, is the privileged mode of expression, in the ℘ℊ scenario. Inviting authors who are not necessarily art critics has been a conscious choice, even if some have already worked in collaboration with artists.