IS DEMOCRACY AN ART?

2001. Photographic installation. Ten 3 x 5 m plastic canvases, mounted on 3 x 6 x 1 m platforms. 

Comissioned by La Maison de Culture de Grenoble – Le Cargo (Francia). 

Is democracy an art?  Ten canvases with photographic reproductions mounted on scaffolding along the perimeter of the renovation works of Le Cargo - Maison de la Culture de Grenoble.
A place, and even more so a public place, is a crossroad of paths, boundaries, stories, facts and imaginations. A thickness composed of layers of heterogeneous and mobile meanings, yet consistent, that never cease to mark differences, to create what, thanks to them, will be able to have a name of its own. 
That is why it seems impossible to imagine an artistic intervention in a public space without first asking oneself what makes room for it. In the case of Is Democracy an art? we've found in the artistic and discursive work of the Obra Pública workshop organized by François Deck on the occasion of the renovation of the Le Cargo building - Maison de la Culture of Grenoble-, not only a stimulus but also a part of the research on the place already formalized.  
The presence of the residents of the neighborhoods near Le Cargo, in the role of exclusive actors of the photographs, is another important strand of this plot. The relationship between the producers of culture, the territory and the different social groups that inhabit the territory and that may feel concerned, not concerned or excluded by the different cultural devices, is evoked and represented by them. They are one of the fundamental vectors of the piece, showing, by their mere presence, some of the tensions that inhabit our current culture.
 

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