LANDESCAPE

ℜ1 Aurélien Lepetit and Arthur Tramier
Current Residency 08.05 - 08.06

Nomads' locus amenus ,the one belonging to human condition, 
the path of humans towards their civilization.
A symbol of spiritual perfection, a place of happiness, 
a mirage, a miracle, a secret place that can be reached by crossing the desert.
"Il sogno mediterraneo" Ludovico Corrao

Aurélien Lepetit is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam (NL). S’He graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon (FR), the School of Design of the East China Normal University, Shanghai (CN) and the Dirty Art Department at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (NL). They have been researching about toxic masculinities and the impact of white cis-heteronormative and patriarchal schemes after experiencing them during their 400m hurdle training practice. It became the base of the body of work STAMINA (2017-2020) which ended after experiencing a burnout while being a precarious cultural worker within several art- and educational institutions in The Netherlands. S’He used this ‘crash’ to reflect, initiate and curate the online interventions Speed Series from a Xeno-feminist perspective and, start a new body of work creating ephemeral multi-sensorial sculptures and mutating site-specific art installations. They hijack environments and situations where they are interested in performing productivity through ephemeral digital archive and the live documentation of a constant evolving practice in ‘becoming’. The exploration of constant growth and the destructive aspect of the human eternal search for limitless life and energies, stamina, bodily exhaustion, burnout, the sustainability of material and their potentialities to be reused, mutated or left, are often reflected upon with a problematic: What stays when bodies cease to be visible?

↑Wellness (Speed - Part 1), 2020. Coloured wax, scent, plaster (detail) @Marineterrein, Amsterdam (NL)

←Wellness (Speed - Part 1) Missing pieces, 2020. Coloured wax and plaster, scent, ropes, variable dimensions @Marineterrein, Amsterdam (NL)

To interpret myself and formulate me I need new signs and new articulations in shapes found on this side and beyond my human story. I transfigure reality and then another dreaming and sleepwalking reality, creates me. And all of me rolls and as I roll on the ground I add to myself in leaves, I, anonymous work of an anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. And then? then all that I lived will be a poor superfluity.

But for the time being I am in the center of everything that screams and teems. And it’s subtle as the most intangible reality. For now time is the duration of a thought.’

Lispector, Clarice (1973) Água viva, (pp.15-16). New Direction Books.

Arthur Tramier (1991, FR) is an artist and designer whose skills encompass the field of material research. He holds an M.F.A. in Art and Design (aka Dirty Art Department) from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. From 2018 to 2020, he has been developing his research on symbiotic and organic design and elasticity at the Art and Design Research Laboratory of ENSAD—PSL University in Paris. He has been working with Alessandro Mendini in Milan and his work has been exhibited in art spaces (Glassbox FR, Deborah Bowmann BE, Kelder UK, De Frabiek NL, etc.) bubbles and squats (Macao, IT, Postnorma NL, etc.) He investigates the complex interrelations between the inert and the living, the synthetic and the organic. His work is caught in a nexus of ever-evolving, transindividuating and transforming forces. He creates sculptural forms and ideas that —like those of the baroque— can unfold, evolve, and envelop, to create a labyrinth of contracting and expanding continuous elastic surfaces. His practice is deeply influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s theoretical, practical, and laboratory research on endlessness, vitalism, morphology, affect, elasticity and multiplicity. His work aims to develop techniques, materials and objects that work within and among the heterogeneous forces that condition synchretic individuations in a complex entanglement between the physical, the vital and the psychosocial.

…)absolute interiority, as an inner surface with only one side, nonetheless has another side, or a minimum of outside. The « unilaterality » of the monad implies as its condition of closure a torsion of the world, an infinite fold that can be unwrapped in conformity with the condition only by recovering the other side, (…) as the outside of its own interiority : a partition, a wall, a supple and adherent membrane coextensive with everything inside; Such is the vinculum : the unlocalizable primary link that borders the absolute interior.

Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. p.111. The Athlone Press.