La Fabrique des Méduses
(The Medusa Factory)
hair lotion, water, agar-agar and various material - 2021
Our society is hurt by so many factors and events that taking care of the audience is becoming more and more crucial.
La Fabrique des Méduses is a performative sculpture. The public is invited to rest during a scalp massage.
This sculpture might be seen as production laboratory where one can experiment an on-going process of massage-rinsing-jellification-cooling-unmolding.
So as to transform this unusual scalp massage to jellyfish, one has just to take three litters of water added to ten grams of jelly agar-agar after each hair rinsing.
Scented by the skimmer, customized by each visitor hairs and named by the first name of each visitor, all jellyfish becomes a kind of still life of this astonishing moment of pleasure.
La Fabrique des Méduses exists in many versions. At maximum, it could be sized to produce 24 jellyfishes a day. Every cycle is about 15 minutes.
Each new visitor starts by release the previous jellyfish of a visitor who experienced this artwork 24 hours ago. A metaphoric and imaginary link binds all visitors. The jellyfishes slowly dry and disappear after around a month. Day by day, the jellyfishes accumulate and draw a collective landscape of individual experiences on the exhibition floor. They submerge the exhibition space but sometime are victims of an accident: few might be crashed by the some clumsy visitors.
Just by being solidified water that tries to froze an encounter, each jellyfish could be seeing as a vanitas.
No one can make these jellyfishes stop to evaporate but isn’t it gentle to diffuse brief moments of poetry into the everyday vibe?