Émilie Perotto
Updated — 08/09/2025

Texts

Sculpture as a project

Text by Balqis Tandjaoui - Translated by Lucy Pons
Produced by Documents d’artistes Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, with the support of the Fondation de l’Olivier, 2024

Émilie Perotto est sculptrice

Par Alexandre Bohn, 2018

Statement

By Émilie Perotto, février 2016 — Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015 (excerpt)

It must be said that my first sculptures appear in precise contexts. The constraints of production and display are the first lines in my list of specifications. So the exhibition context is a central factor of the work process. I usually begin this latter by focusing on the architectural and spatial context, which subsequently leads me to broach socio-economic contexts.
The concreteness of exhibition venues, as well as the “presentness” of the encounter between visitor, sculpture and space, are the nerve centres of my research. This is how I see sculpture, as the medium of the encounter between a human body and a plastic body in a defined space. I've called this encounter a “sculptural situation”.

 

I'd like all my works to produce in the visitor what I call a “sculptural feeling”, which depends on the construction of the “sculptural situation”. My sculptures are component and revelatory agents of this. They put visitors in a specific situation, for a suspended period of time, during which they have the physical and mental experience of a space. [...]

Sculpture is what it is and it is from such reality that its poetry emerges

By Anne Kawala, 2008