︎




CAMELLE

Salin des Pesquiers
august 2022


Non-habitable structure Ø 5m
100 rubble bags, beach sand, PVC tube



The camel is a pyramid of salt on a saline site. Having grown up on the peninsula of Giens, when the site was still industrialized, this white mountain of salt was an emblematic monument that I looked for on my way to kindergarten. When the site was closed in 1995, the mount disappeared and the Conservatoire du Littoral acquired the entire plot. During my residency, I tried to bring it back to life, as if to build a monument as a tribute. 



We reproduced the gestures of the workers who bagged the salt, right here : a titanic effort. When the first rain storm comes, the 100 bags will burst and the sand will irrevocably fall back on tthe land, consolidating the fragile strip of land linking the island to the mainland. The geological phenomenon of the double-tombolo is very rare with only five occurences existing in the world. 

Drone photos © Thomas Teurlai



LE TERRITOIRE DU VIDE

Résidence Rouvrir le Monde
w. Niccolò Moscatelli︎︎︎
Salin des Pesquiers



︎︎︎Tarp left in the salted water for a month
︎︎︎Brick wall in XIXth bricks destroyed by the salt



︎︎︎Cairels and vegetal leather
︎︎︎Water from the salines, dunaliela salina


Maintained by man and inhabited by birds, the Salins de Hyères blur the line between nature and culture, between human and animal agency. By focusing on gestures and practices rather than the perpetrators of these gestures, we leave the framework of classical historical understanding to be more in line with a new postanthropic ecological and philosophical vision.
From the first step of the human being to the great constructions of our civilizations, the understanding of space, its arrangement and its geographical, political and social significance were at the basis of this common work.



︎︎︎Tubes of pine and eucalyptus wood excavated to emulate the meleze pipelines carrying saltwater in the XIXth century


︎︎︎Loan from the agricultural and alimentary fund of the MUCEM︎︎︎



LE TERRITOIRE DU VIDE

Experimental edition
w. Niccolò Moscatelli︎︎︎
+ Studio A2︎︎︎

︎ Commander ici︎︎︎



We produced a book in addition to all these interventions. As an art and design teacher, I have developed around fifteen experimental editorial works. It seemed essential to us to tell the story of our immersion in an science-fiction story written by Niccolò.



In collaboration with Studio A2, in risography and insulated cover. Appearing all white before being cut, the object evokes the existential questions of our 3 months on the site: how to represent the vertigo of creation, absence, emptiness, loneliness, waiting and silence ?

Sun insulated cover / Risography
30 pages
100 ex.



L’ASCENSION DU MONT VENTOUX

with Niccolò Moscatelli︎︎︎
Dry-stone masonry
Savoillans
2m x 2m x 2m


Inspired by the rocky region of the Baronnies Provençales, between the Drôme and the Alpes de Haute-Provence, L'Ascension du Mont Ventoux is a dry stone pyramid, technique without binder mortar, a tribute to the endemic architecture of the bories and the shepherds' shelters. At the foot of the northern slope of Mont Ventoux, the structure recalls by formal analogy the mountain and welcomes within it the rays of the sun at its zenith. The loophole allows us to glimpse, without revealing, an unconsecrated relic which expresses in its materiality the miracle of light and its power.

︎︎︎ 3D Scan 3D of the sculpture


A form of devotion to the world, this altar exists between the nature and culture of these places and underlines their perfect interdependence.




AUTODIDAXIE
with Léa Bigot︎︎︎

Autodidaxie is a formal and material research project, an exploration where the academic method would have been abandoned in favor of an emotional and intuitive approach to matter and space. In a free and claimed position of non-knowledge, the two artists twist the familiar uses and elements of domestic architecture into a joyful, uninhibited, absurd and poetic language. Through cohabitation, joint work and sharing the same space, rapprochement takes place. They work by formal echoes, tell each other the imaginary story of a woman in autarky who would be their avatar and this story begins to support the objects and to link them together. The pieces built with four hands represent the culmination of this month-long journey. Game or laboratory? The only rules are the material constraints – as essential as pure expressiveness, as if on one depended the liberation of the other. Using only raw, unprocessed materials, concentrating on one material at a time to give shape to mono-material objects, having a very limited range of non-professional tools available. The experiment is clear and reproducible.







The knife does not cut, the table is soft, the chair does not hold: we recognize them as objects of our daily life, we know how to read them, but they are only the intimate memories of objects whose form was determined by the function. Their primary characteristic is their failure in the face of productivist standards, their fundamental unsaleability, their profound refusal of capitalist reproducibility. A design of instinct without the will to civilization that becomes impossible to industrialize.

The performative part of this experience - the radical compression of the creative process over the given period and the direct and physical relationship to the material in this field of experimentation - is a matter of physical endurance and involves a constant total mobilization. There are only the bodies of the two artists, the materials and the fight against gravity. The urgency to create.


CINQ MÊTRES CUBES

Hybrid’Art 2022
Centre d’Art Fernand Léger︎︎︎

Human action is always torn imperceptibly between the need to meet primary needs, common to all animals, and the desire to represent the world, specific to human beings. The fundamental need to protect oneself, to find refuge, is always accompanied by the desire to represent the world there, to which it is linked by a myth. CINQ MÊTRES CUBES is an installation using the endemic Provençal technique of dry stone without any mortar or binder. Non-industrializable construction system that uses local stone, a natural, healthy, reusable material. Here a destoning stone from the neighboring Bandol vineyards.



Borie ø 2m
Dry-stone masonry

CINQ MÊTRES CUBES explores the relationship between space, exhibition space and endemic architecture. Isolated from the rural fabric, the link between architecture and city is fatally broken. I give the Borie the character of an object, of an artefact far removed from the strictly architectural character. I set up a “social framework of memory” relating to space and time, a global system of the past that allows individual and collective remembrance. CINQ MÊTRES CUBES fully assumes its quality as an artistic work without losing its testimonial value.








CHAMBORD LE GRAND ESCALIER

The dry brick installation of the grand staircase reinterprets freely and with humor - and a touch of healthy pretension - the staircase of the Château de Chambord, as if taken from an image in a history book or from a memory of a trip to family. A plausible and improbable proposition at the same time, fictitious but very real, like the non-architect builders and their great works. The unfinished structure leaves plenty of room for function interpretations. Blind frame or promise of habitat?

«Hyperreality springboards off our preconceptions -which come from film, paintings, and books, but rarely from memories of the real thing- until the visitor reaches a state of what historians call "sensibility," the feeling of actually "being there," totally immersed in another time and place.  The psychic echo of our memory plays a central role in the modern theme park visit. We all bring to the parks the eidetic imagery and iconography of other times and places, sorted and codified in our memories from myriad sources. Well-traveled visitors may remember the campanile in Florence or China's Temple of Heaven from personal experience. Most, however, bring "mediated" memories from popular sources-eclectic images from advertising, photographs, television, movies. In either case, these memories, imperfect and derivative to begin with, are colored by time and emotion. »

The Theme Park - The Art of Time and Space
Margaret J. King and J. G. O'Boyle

POC Festival
sept 2021



FRACTIONS

Contemporary Art Center of Briançon
with Niccolò Moscatelli︎︎︎




0,4 Sand from the Durance, decomposing tree trunks
The living world, the biological, and the non-living, the mineral, follow the same cycles of birth, appearance of form and decomposition. At the end of each cycle lives the dust, the primordial atoms which are recomposed and thus again become form. This valley is a privileged place to observe this cycle. Fractions is placed at this moment just before the restart, at the moment when things lose their identity while awaiting transformation. The trunks recovered on the paths between Pierre Feu and Puy-Saint-André are eaten away by microbes and termites, digested by fungi before uniting with the humus of the forest. The sand mixed with the gravel of the bed of the Durance continues its slow disintegration to finally land on the seabed and become rocks again.



3D CLAY PRINTING

Having explored powder sintering 3D printing in my research about experimental books, my attention fell on this fascinating technique, I discovered at 8Fablab. The  printer there allowed the production of large formats, I produced a collection of small ceramic furniture called VOLCANS. The shapes produced are simple extrusions of the gradient of two vector shapes, the digital process of creating the volume remains very readable.






When extruding the earth along the tool path, I artificially searched for accidents by interrupting the machine, breaking pieces with my finger, to obtain more irregularities in my volume rendering, a path less perfect and less regular strata. When printing, I kept the toolpath of the machine clearly visible by printing without a nozzle to obtain a coarser coil and a less smooth finish. 3D printing is always magical, but its rendering can seem too perfect and too digital.




BÉNITIERS SAUVAGES

Contemporary Art Center of Briançon
with Niccolò Moscatelli︎︎︎



The stones that make up this installation were found in the bed of the Sacha torrent or in its close surroundings. Water and time have polished them and left traces of their passage on them: hollows have formed naturally over the years. These hollows have been widened using scissors until they are real clams of raw rock. It is not a question of imposing a form, but of continuing its initial momentum, of imitating the work of water and its patient contact with stone. Each basin contains water from a different stream in the valley, tinged with fluorescein that glows under black light.



Cut stones, water from the river Sacha, water from the Durance, water from the Peyra des Merles, water from the comunal canals,  fluorescein.



RUE SAINTE-ANNE

101 pages
SLS 3D printing (powder sintering)
22 x 13 cm
3D model printed on tracing paper
Glued square-back
POST-BOOKS

Through her experimental editions Violaine Barrois pushes the object-book to its limits, she questions its experience and offers a new spatial-temporal narrative. Combining traditional printing methods and cutting-edge technology (3D printing with powder sintering, slicing, anti-counterfeiting inks, etc.), it materializes an unprecedented sensory experience. It redefines the limits of the surface of the image and tries to reactivate the emotion produced by the experience of reading in an all-digital era. The paper becomes air, stone, volume, mirror, the text is stripped of its words and the story is written through forms, manipulation, discovery.



TUBULAR

50 pages
Transparent Xerox films
Plexiglass
Binding screw

LE GRAND BLEU

Transparent Quadrifluox™ ink
on Fedrigoni GSK 90g extra white  tracing-paper
Format A8

TERRAZO

34 pages
12 x 12 cm
Fedrigoni Arena 200g

The pattern disappears through the pages

© 2023 VIOLAINE BARROIS 
L’IMMEUBLE ATELIER   12 TRAV. MAGNAN  13003 MARSEILLE