"LES HABITANTS DU SILENCE"

“Just because I don't know it, don't see it or don't hear it, doesn't mean IT IS NOT HAPPENING.”
STREET ART RILLIEUX - FRANCE 2023

During the month of April I was invited by Space Junk Lyon to be part of their artistic residency project that they carry out in the city of Rillieux-La-Pape. A small town north of Lyon.
The intention of the residency was for me to work with complete freedom, taking over an uninhabited apartment in an old block of flats, which would later be shown as a gallery in guided tours until its demolition in the next month of November.

My apartment was located on the first floor. A house with five rooms and two bathrooms, some closets, several terraces and a small hole in one of its walls. The best? Its light. It entered first thing in the morning from one side and at dusk, it slipped again through the windows that faced the other side. Light walls and ceilings and a very warm atmosphere despite being completely empty. Two floors above was my house for the entire week that my residency lasted.

Despite having a pre-established idea of what my intervention would be, in my intention there was a large part of improvisation during the process, of making decisions on the fly. Something that perhaps I am not used to having so much in my work.
I thought of talking about the very fact of leaving a place and how nature resumes its path inside, as if nothing had happened. What most caught my attention during the days of my residency was the silence, or that apparent silence that occupied the entire space, only disturbed by sounds coming from outside. I started working on the first room on the left. All the rooms were connected and you could go from one to the other without repeating. Room, terrace, corridor, closet, bathroom, room, kitchen, bathroom, hole and final room. That was going to be the route of my intervention. A piece that ran through the entire apartment, which had a beginning and a supposed end.

One by one, 265 swallows fly around the 6 rooms of this uninhabited and supposedly abandoned apartment.

Leaving a place only means leaving it, nothing more.
Abandoning it is returning that space, again, to nature.
Open the door to other lives, to other species, to other rhythms.

Just because a tree falls in the forest and we don't hear it, doesn't mean it hasn't fallen.
That we close a door to never open it again, does not mean that there is not someone or something, that one day will do it again.
That he inhabit that place again, that he occupy his silence and that he take advantage of it. And that after a while, close the same door again.
And so on.

Nature gives in (almost always), allows us. And when we leave, he picks it up and adapts. It accepts our changes and absorbs them.
Just because I don't know it, don't see it or don't hear it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

By the way, sound comes from three motion-activated speakers.

From now on, Les habitants du silence can be visited in person until the building is demolished. Then 265 swallows will fly again, but this time in another place with the same silence.
Thanks for the opportunity to Space Junk Lyon and especially Nemanja for everything.
It has been a pleasure.