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Fabrice Gygi

09.26.08 - 10.19.08
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Fabrice Gygi, exhibition view, Musée les Abattoirs, 2008, ©DR, Le Printemps de septembre - à Toulouse

Fabrice Gygi is also exhiting at the Fondation espace écureuil.

Born in 1965, he lives and works in Geneva.

 

This leading figure in the Swiss art scene finds the essence of his critical forms, sculptures, performances, prints and installations in the violence and security-related terror of the contemporary world. Grandstands, tents, playgrounds, riot barriers, instruments of torture and bars all challenge the mechanisms of authority and put the onlooker in an ambiguous situation: “Each and every citizen, male and female, is a potential figure of authority, because their position is invariably adjacent and susceptible to power”.
Fabrice Gygi will be representing Switzerland at the next Venice Biennale.

 

What is your project for Le Printemps de septembre?

When I first visited the place, the huge central corridor of les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse that leads to the pit, I said to myself that it would have to be occupied lengthwise. I didn't bother to find out if this was really the old slaughterhouse; I just take things as they are, literally, so I imagined this hard machine, a sort of chopper that would even fill the pit. With conveyor belts to transport the corpses, because there exists in slaughterhouses the idea of a mass death, an industrial death. So I designed it like that, with teeth and belts. If you topple into it, it's activated by the weight of your body. And you get out of there in a pretty bad way.

 

Where did you get the title for this piece: Winch , Fliessband and stars system ?

It's a title that's been worked on quite a lot, involving three languages from central Europe which correspond to the three stages of the machine. First there's the winch , from which you can hang something, then the conveyor belt, in German— Fliessband —and lastly the “stars system”. I find it quite amusing to use this expression to describe the chopper's metal stars. I should add that I was in Los Angeles when I designed an initial version of this piece, about three years ago, and to start with it was a work for outdoors: metal fairy lights, with stars set on cables, like an anti-helicopter system.