Alexis Deconinck

"You have to turn the passive into an activity. This phrase from Louise Bourgeois is a good reflection of her psychoanalytical relationship to her artistic production. She sees art as a search within herself. Each sculpture is deep, intimate and personal.

I practice installation and sculpture. My favourite places of expression are architecture, space and our ways of living. I am particularly sensitive to public art. I like the idea that art is in the street, accessible to all. Installing in the urban or natural context is also an opportunity to work on large formats, to be interested in the monumentality of pieces or to produce spatial experiences.

Part of my work is interested in transforming objects from the architectural and urban vocabulary to produce a poetic narrative. These are everyday, utilitarian and serial objects that proliferate around us. They are very identifiable and not very remarkable because our eye is so used to them. They carry a well-defined meaning because of their use, they are very specialised and respond to a unique function. I like to twist their meaning, to play with them and to propose a new use to get out of the single function, to go from the utilitarian to the poetic.

I am particularly interested in objects used in the city to limit our freedom of movement. These objects that I define as "blocking", I transform them so that they become "enabling", that is to say that they offer freedom, possibilities, new uses. These interventions often take place in areas of the city undergoing transformation, building sites or dilapidated public spaces. As these spaces are in transition, they offer everyone room for the imagination. The building site is often lined with strange, colourful, deformed objects, like unknown creatures. The questions that drive me are : How can we live with these objects? How can the transformation of the city feed our imagination? (installations: Bend the line, Passage secret, Chaud Bardonnet, On de Senne)

I am nourished by geometry. I started using it in architecture. Later, it was by studying carpentry that I really understood its power. I like to bend, twist and curve. Origami inspires me. I don't use it as a figurative practice but as a tool that transforms a plane into volume to create a space. I am fascinated by the relief, its forms, its emergences, its chasms, its plateaus, its rocks and peaks, all the folds of a terrain. I don't know where this interest comes from, but I see how fascinating it is to see that it is in the folds that life can germinate. It is in the folds of the ground that sediments can accumulate. The fold gives thickness to what is flat, it creates space, emptiness and fullness. I was born and raised in a lunar landscape. When I discovered the mountains, I was amazed by the vertical relationship to the earth which gave me the feeling of being "in" and not "on" the landscape. (installations: Pop up island, Bend the line, Monoliths)

I also explore the possibilities of disappearance as a performative mode of the work. The disappearance of an object creates a narrative around transformation and impermanence. It questions our relationship to the object in time, it relativizes our absolute control of the material. It is a slow, almost invisible performance. In the installation La mue de la colonne, I staged the disappearance through erosion of three traditional mud masonry columns. The rain and the sun have worked this earth and little by little have eroded it. A wooden structure, hidden under the earth, gradually revealed itself. In another installation, (Réveiller les gardiens de la terre endormis with the artist Clara Vulliez) I am researching the disappearance of earth sculptures. A profusion of small earthen creatures invade a space, some raw, others baked. The sculptures carry seeds, they represent the fertility of the earth. As they disappear under the climate, they give birth to plants and flowers, leaving a lush and strange vegetation.

This research echoes these two quotations: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed" (Lavoisier) and "life always invents" (G. Clément), which for me put into perspective the current anxieties of humanity about its extinction. Life will continue whatever happens. It is written in the earth's genes.