Appel d'air (Inflow of Air)

Plastic sheeting, twine - 1996

In-situ intervention, Higher School of Art and Design (ESAD), Reims

Appel d'air, 1996 In-situ intervention, École Supérieure d'Art et de Design (ESAD), Reims Plastic sheeting, twine

Plastic sheeting stretched and tied with twine across a space, catching every movement of air — every opening door, every passing body. What architecture normally contains, Appel d'air makes suddenly visible: the invisible currents that run through buildings, the breath of a place. The material is the cheapest possible; the effect is quietly uncanny.

Both works share the same raw material — plastic, in its most disposable forms — and the same unlikely ambition: to make the invisible visible. In Appel d'air (1996), sheets of plastic sheeting strung with twine across the halls of the Reims School of Art catch and betray every current of air moving through the building — the breath of a space made suddenly, quietly legible. Four years later, at the La Napoule Art Foundation, The Seventh Continent scales that gesture towards the planetary: a patchwork of bin bags assembled into a vast blue tarpaulin, driven into ceaseless waves by a concealed fan. The ocean enters the room. What had been drifting, largely unseen, in the middle of the Pacific — that immense gyre of plastic waste already known as the seventh continent — is here rendered immediate, domestic, impossible to look away from. In both works, the lightest and cheapest of materials holds its ground against the weight of what it asks us to consider.