This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition Vivre là, at Eva Hober Gallery from 13 February to 16 March 2014, which presents a collection of pieces on themes such as housing, urban expansion and its lifestyles and contrasted landscapes. The exhibition questions the viewer on the way in which we inhabit the world, a question that permeates your practice and that takes on many different forms throughout the particular contexts in which you live and work. The disorientation they provoke in you is often at the basis of your works. Is this the case in this new exhibition?

The title of the exhibition, Vivre là, is a set phrase that I found on a real estate developer's website. I belong to that half of the world population residing in the city. The saturated real estate market induced me to rent a studio in a rural zone. I cover the 40 kilometres between my home and my work place by car, thereby following the route of urban sprawl. I pass through shopping zones, roundabouts, villages, subdivisions... As I drive I observe the landscape and its transformations: I discover new sidewalk edges; a logistical platform or a data centre that seems to have erupted in the middle of a field; I follow a deviation set up to circumnavigate road works meant to “conceal the network”; I count the number of relay masts... I notice urban sprawling, the reduction of agricultural space, the spread of asphalt. The exhibition formed around the frequentation of such spaces, between urban and rural zones, for the most part the domain of automobiles, where standardization and normalizing are concretely manifested in the habitations and spatial planning.
More generally speaking, beyond the geographical framework, I relate my work to the historical, social and economic context of the environment in which it takes place. I try to remain in a state of porosity and receptivity with regard to the environment in which I find myself when I'm working. I try to experience my daily journeys as though I were travelling to the other side of the world and to maintain an acute sense observation in the midst of familiar contexts.

In Vivre là we find motifs that are recurrent in your work, such as with Parpaing but also in new pieces such as Giratoires that perfectly illustrate this acuity you display. Can you talk about these pieces?

In construction, the breeze block is a sort of common denominator, a standard contemporary object that I've worked with on several occasions. In this instance, I made a breeze block out of ceramic, by hand. I made it using grogged sandstone whose appearance is similar to that of cement. Following the relationship between the represented object and the technique employed, I

“destandardised” an industrial object. This breeze block is the “first stone”; it contains within itself the potential of a building to come while referencing the history of materials: ancient tiles were made out of terracotta.

In Giratoires, I set out to film the roundabouts that I pass through during my car journey between my home and my studio, according to a predefined protocol. In France today there are more than

30,000 roundabouts, making up about half of the roundabouts in the world. Using a digital camera attached at the front of the car, I use tracking shots to film the centre of the roundabout. I tend to prefer roundabouts that contain some landscaping at their centre. These planted spaces that aren't meant to be walked across are artificial landscapes created in the middle of intersections and without any relation to the vegetal population around them since foreign species are reintroduced there.

Also presented in the exhibition are recent drawings I made on different media: there are the pencil on paper drawings in the Lotissement ¹ series, a diagram of a nuclear power plant presented on an LED screen in La poursuite du nucléaire ² and an etching on a lithographic stone in the diptych Extraction/Fossile ³.

These last two drawings remind me of older works of yours, like Les catastrophes sont naturelles ⁴, one of your first series, completed in 2004-2005. In it you reproduced scientific diagrams representing methods of natural resource extraction and energy production. The question of popularising complex scientific phenomena and man's – often invisible – dominance over nature are given centre stage here...

Everything began with my self-portrait À la mine ⁵ that, over a height of 1.75 metres – almost my height – represents the surface installations of a coal mine set on top of the layers of geological strata supporting them. The title contains a play on words about the represented scientific object, the tool I used to execute the drawing – a graphite pencil ⁶ - and the extent of the work that lay before me at the time – that is, at the beginning of my artistic career: “to get one's hands dirty” in the mine.

The series entitled Les catastrophes sont naturelles comprises a sculpture and several drawings that all represent a cross section of the earth's substrata. I like the idea that rocks have recorded inside them the trace of a great length of time. The series attempts to understand the layers and the riches that sleep below the earth's surface and puts human beings' actions into the perspective of a gigantic time scale, with the underlying idea that whenever man puts his hand to nature, something escapes his control.

In images of scientific popularisation, a very complex phenomenon that operates on a very large scale is simplified to the extreme in order to make it comprehensible at a glance. This simplification gives these images a universal dimension and to my eyes presents great potential for subversion. My drawing work consists in part in bringing these two extremes into tension: I use a minuscule gesture – pencilling with a graphite lead 0.3 or 0.5 mm in diameter – in order to represent a planetary phenomenon.

This tension between the individual and planetary scales – very significant today – is at the heart of emblematic works like Empreinte Ecologique ⁷...

This installation catalyses several important aspects of my work.
First of all, sculpture: the imprint technique that I used to realise the installation is a traditional sculptural technique consisting in filling a hollow plaster and so materialising the form.

Before the actual production of the piece, I began by collecting the empty packaging of my daily food consumption, recycling as it were for my artistic production. I incorporated the waste into my sculptural process, a recurring notion throughout my work.

I would take a plastic container, fill it with plaster, then unmold it: this places us within the question in sculpture of the content and the container as well as in an economy of the manipulations and means necessary to produce the piece. Furthermore, this installation reveals, in a way, a part of what I am through what I have consumed over a given period. A portrait of the artist as a consumer.

The title adds an extra dimension to the work. What importance do you attach to your generally quite eloquent titles?

The title Empreinte écologique unambiguously pushes the interpretation of the installation in a certain direction since this term – much in use at the moment – refers to a means of environmental evaluation that enables us to measure the pressure exerted by man on his surroundings and, among other things, our current need for more space to absorb our waste.

A projected piece takes shape when it has found a title that “works”. Titles are a very precious tool that help to orientate the way the artworks are read while leaving free reign for interpretation. I enjoy playing with the multiple meanings of words and I write my titles in French. I often resort to catchphrases coming from the media; they form a sort of linguistic signage that frames our relationship with the world and for this reason they deserve to be subverted. Titles allow me to literally characterize the image or object that I'm representing as it is while attributing a figurative double meaning that refers to societal issues.

You seem particularly interested in the formal and speculative potential of food packaging. This is a material you've been using since 1998 in the series entitled Cornets cubains ⁸...

Yes, let's take the example of these cones made in Havanna where, accompanied by several classmates from the Beaux-arts and our professor Vincent Barré, we decided to go to organise an

exhibition with Cuban students... The political system having forbidden the island's inhabitants to leave the country and the embargo imposed by the United States having led to a situation of utter shortage of all consumer goods, the Cubans invented means of making objects that would cover the basic necessities of everyday life. In Cuba, these inventions born of scarcity have become a real way of life.

Walking down the street I found an empty cone, a piece of paper folded very simply. This type of container is used to wrap takeaway street food. In a country where food is scarce, I discovered that Cubans had reinvented in their way the concepts of snacking and takeaway. This object, simple and efficient through its shape, invented to compensate for lack, seemed to me particularly emblematic of Cuba's situation. While there I reproduced ten cones with local wrapping paper and then – like the “artists” of Montmartre – I cut out the silhouettes of Paris monuments from memory.

The result reflects the fantasy vision of France expressed by many Cubans that we met during the trip. At the same time, these objects invert the stereotypical exoticism, the “postcard” vision of this “dream” island in the Caribbean that we uphold here, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Later on you reproduced all sorts of food packaging for sandwiches, pizza, fast food, soda, etc. You then arranged these copies in display cases, as in the installations Carrefour ⁹ or La vie chère ¹⁰. What do these wrappers and installations express?

A large part of the objects I make often have a link to food. The essential act of eating is governed today to a large extent by the food processing industry and superstores. Packaging – and overpackaging – have become the strategic interfaces in the power relationship in which the industry holds the consumer. I am interested in the packaging emptied of its contents because it is this remainder of what was consumed that reveals the entire system.

I identify with archaeologists whose job it is often to go through the waste bins of History. Let's say that I engage in real time in a sort of archaeology of our contemporary lifestyle.

In everyday life, the purpose of display windows is to place before our eyes and highlight objects for sale. They are also a means of exhibiting rare objects in museums for example, by protecting them from touch. This double affiliation with the world of marketing and museography make this a very appropriate device with which to frame my objects.

The question of recycling is often introduced in your creative and technical choices. How attentive are you to the origins of your materials and resources?

The recycling economy was put in place after a study trip to Ghana and then Cuba, a country in which the material conditions are so poor that nothing can afford to be lost and where the organisational strategies are at complete odds with our own.

My operating method truly took form in London in 2000 during a stay at the Slade School of Fine Art where I found myself materially unable to obtain the traditional sculpture materials. As I walked through the city, I realized that it contained an astronomical quantity of rejected materials (carpeting, linoleum, wood, metal, etc.). I began sorting through the trash in order to bring pieces back to my studio with a view to transforming them. This is how I began using the materials of everyday life found in the street. From this constraint born of circumstance came about thirty raw and cobbled together objects that I presented in an installation entitled Matériaux divers, dimensions variables ¹¹, an oft-used expression in contemporary art subtitling terminology. The subtitle replaced the title.

Later, I sometimes came to use the waste product of my own production. For example, I made an object using a cluster of staples rescued from a previous installation made out of wooden crates recovered at the end of a market. The “de-stapling” operation of almost 200 crates – entirely done by hand – was so difficult that I promised myself I would use the staples for another project. I therefore made the Cake d'agrafes ¹².

Why do you impose such tedious and constraining work protocols on yourself?

There are all the external constraints that govern my existence and over which I have no control (economic constraints, time constraints, etc.) and which may paralyse me, preventing me from making or doing anything. Within my work process I have set up additional constraints for which I am entirely responsible. This gives me the feeling that I am in control of the situation.

I would relate the tedious and repetitive dimension of my work to the very definition of the word “work”, a term that refers to “the state of a person that suffers and is tormented” and “all human activities coordinated with the aim of producing something”. In my work, I try to bring together the private dimension and the universal quality of the labouring human condition.

You act like a falsifier by producing a handmade copy of mass-produced objects. Isn't there a certain contradiction in wanting to defy the logic of industrial production by mechanising one's practice?

To defy is to refuse to bow down, to obey. Defiance is also an obstacle that civilisation must overcome in its evolution.
For me, copying an ordinary object (or image) is akin to giving it importance. Exposing this copy to the eyes of the viewer is to play with perception and to ask the question of what exists in order to go beyond appearances. On a deeper level, this means questioning the notion of truth and belief in a society that is very comfortable cheating with reality when it suits its needs.

My drawing work asserted itself when I tried to manually imitate the precision of the printer, a machine whose function is to reproduce reality as closely as possible. By the movement of my hand, the copy takes on a part of me. The mechanisation of the gesture corresponds to an attempt to rationalise in order to keep all affect at a distance.

Creating by hand makes you spend time with the objects and images, and in the intimacy of making, allows you to understand them with your hands. The love of the well-executed gesture is not my concern; rather, by experiencing a repetitious gesture, I apply to an artisanal approach the production rationale of mechanical activity. In this way, I become conscious of what scaling back labour represents. And in working with my hands there is also the need to free myself from technological prostheses.

In this way you created a whole series of false objects: Économe ¹³, Faux papiers...

Économe, realised in 1998 was my very first copied object. It was an object made according to my method and in which I imitated the well known kitchen utensil. In the piece I played with switching the materials, with the slightly uncanny resemblance to the copied object, the relationship between the title and the object... it is a “programmatic” object as we'd say today. Then came the series Faux papiers, begun when I was living in the 18th arrondissement in Paris. Over the course of my daily walks in the neighbourhood, I found a losing ticket on the ground, not far from a shop selling National Lottery tickets. Every day, people went into this shop to try their luck in the hopes of a better life. This document was charged with their disappointment. This is why I chose to represent it. The series Faux papiers began in this Parisian context, through contact with these neighbours of mine for whom identity papers are a vital issue.

In the same vein, I began a series entitled Liste de courses ¹⁴.

There are also the tickets in Files d'attente¹⁵...

I left Paris several years ago. Moving house also means going on an “administrative journey”. When I arrived in Lyon, I began by spending lots of time in various administrative procedures. This was an advantageous vantage point from which to observe the management of the flow of users in the different administrations I visited. I kept my waiting tickets and copied them. These “release” drawings are an homage to wasted time.

You also pay tribute to those who periodically stray from the norm and, through small, ingenious gestures, come to terms with it. This is the point in Arrangements, a photographic inventory that you began in 2005...

This series reveals what I observe. It is a work of observation, a list of clues that aims to record, with the help of a digital camera that I have on me almost at all times, the traces that individuals – that I characterize as invisible – leave behind them in the public space, in their homes, at their workplace or places of leisure. The French term “arrangement” signifies the act of placing in a certain order and it also implies the notions of compromise and beautification. The idea is to in short, to manage. These often fragile and temporary arrangements carry the signs of a spontaneous, intuitive and unique expression that rises up from the undifferentiated mass of a normalised universe.

Archiving and inventory are often the basis and the common thread that weaves throughout your work, as one can see from your notebooks. You often react to an association of phrases and images, puns, catchphrases and user manuals taken from your environment...

Inventory and collecting are the invisible part of my work. I collect images from the press, instruction manuals, brochures or explanatory diagrams that I store in binders or in the form of digital archives.

I work in contact with current affairs, by listening to the radio from which I pluck themes, images and emblematic phrases expressing world issues. The themes I explore come from a number of fields: economics, ecology, energy-related geopolitics, geography, history, etc. I go further by researching in scientific popularisation books, in essays and on the web.

My notebooks allow me to give form to these image and language extractions, to put them in relation with one another and to reorganize them according to my own inner logic by placing them in opposition, complementarily or by analogy...

How do you perceive your role as an artist when dealing with the big questions that shape the news and which you seem to want to confront?

My work is driven by these questions. As an artist, the point is not for me to “play a certain character in the world”, but instead to fulfil a function: creating works that are in touch with the world I am a part of, and to share them. In my aesthetic system, the tenuous space between what I make and reality echo the small room for manoeuvre we have today in the face of the bulldozer effect of globalisation.

How do your family origins and the rural environment in which you grew up inform your work?

I was born in Algeria in the city of Médéa where my parents, after completing literary studies, lived and taught for five years before returning to the village where my father was born. That is where I grew up, in a village with a population of 180 in Burgundy, where my family has cultivated the vine since the 16th century.

My grandfather was what you would call a “pioneer” of organic farming. As early as the 1960s he decided to move towards unconventional vine cultivation methods at a time when the use of products from the chemical industry in agriculture was spreading and becoming the norm. In his wake my uncle, the youngest brother, took over the vineyard...

It's obvious that my artistic approach uses my grandfather's story as a reference as well as my parents' activism.
The carefree quality of my years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris has given way to a reflective attitude towards modes of production and consumption, and towards the needs and resources of the society of which I am a part.

How do your civic involvement and your individual responsibility accommodate themselves with your artistic practice?

Creating works and showing them is a responsibility that one chooses, as an artist, to take on. This does not mean retreating from society but on the contrary, to take part and get involved; it rests on an individual decision that concerns the collective sphere.

To face the established order, I often need to act without the filter of art, through activism or militancy. There is a large amount of tension within me between individual responsibility on one hand, and the ironic distance and stepping back, or even retreat, that are part of my practice, and on the other hand, the direct confrontation and concrete collective action demanded by our project to shake up the rules imposed upon us.

The art world doesn't escape the questions pertaining to the law of the market, productivity or profitability. The formal and technical choices I make are linked to this fact. Indeed, the will to work at my pace, to the scale of my hand or the means at my disposal allow me to evade an economy of artwork production in which the logic of production cost reduction and the subcontracting system are a reality.

Is this a way for you to foil the system?

It's a way to live with it. “Civilised” man has deployed colossal effort to normalise the environment in which he lives. With the help of my puny tools, I try to understand the workings of the System. I set up strategies and protocols that imitate certain of its aspects in order to question its faults. I oppose my manual work to the “invisible hand” of the system. The undertaking is absurd but it allows me to take a stand and remain standing.