DIALOGUE
Photographer: Clément Chouleur
Skater: Noah Mahieu
Format: A3 - 297x420
Munken Pure Rough 150gr
Risographer
Edition of 100

DIALOGUE
The city is constant feedback:
from the lines and patches that meet to knit a composition of architectural fabric, to the pulse of its own evolution through the motion of the humans continuously iterating within, it breathes in the now to anticipate the future all the while based on selected shards of its past.
Such vibrancy in saturated spaces naturally drives two instincts: competition, as
performance becomes all the more synonymous with survival, and, complementarily,
escapism, when and where the former becomes overbearing.
That is when urban sinuations tend to turn into insinuations, calling for sometimes
personal, always collective pushes of what the Situationists called « Dérive » towards
forms of artistic reclamation and contemporary reinterpretation of one’s given settings.
The room for mundane experimentation and exploration is crucial - all the more so in
contexts of increasingly private space - for that is where the individual is allowed to
express themselves as such amongst the group, a ritual that is vital to any pretense of
identity and justifies the importance of the role of play in the city. It directly sharpens the initiative and consolidates the cooperation that keep the pulse itself running and thus, the reality of its culture.
Open urban landscapes mostly consisting in shapes and surfaces and skateboarding
mostly consisting in trying exactly these from a wheeled perspective, it aligns that the two would complement one another and so a relatively popular practice naturally would emerge.
Skateboarding around the built environment is a phenomenon of adaptation: proactive, as the playground is invented by the means of literal spots and lines, and subjugated, as its impermeability isn’t bound just to the next imminent obstacle but also to the greater contextualized ensemble. The navigation is physical in its manifestation all the while its grid intersects with the one of Yves Klein’s « Void »; the action is accessible from either first or third person, its perception dependent on degree of attention and focus, and always reliant on intelligence in the angle which can be one of the performer, documentarist, coincidental pedestrian or persistent resident. The moment comes together as one that is dialogic and federative rather than avoidant and selfish, in spite of its admission to escapism.
Monuments are one form persistence can take, keeping track of a civilization’s wins and losses along its pretense of domination over its own nature, thereby usually encapsulating their respective curated instances of trauma. As soon as their design is public however anchors them into a role that can only transcend their original intent as the present keeps articulating around their mark and only that is when the memories they are intended to represent truly get to speak, when faced with a current interlocutor, or tactile guest.
Eventually, the documentation of such exchanges might result in revealing new original depths within the monument, thereby keeping consulting and refreshing its validity.
The resulting images are then free to turn into their own form of monument; the tangible remains of a dialogue that once was.
Aymeric Nocus