In 1853, the Hutchinson factory was established in Chalette-sur-Loing
There were 700 workers in the 1900s, 2,600 at the Liberation (nearly double in 1939, before the German occupation), 4,600 in 1957. Foreign labor fueled this growth. Today approximately 1,400 between the workers and the research center.
Guykayser presents a multimedia artwork that reveals the evolution of names across a territory over 100 years. The work connects the probable origins of the names of children born or individuals deceased in the municipality to the years in question, as well as the French departments in which these same names are most represented.
The viewer thus sees the intimate connections that form between distant territories through onomastic heritage.
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View the artwork The Civil Registry Shelf
One also hears the evolution of surnames, from Chalette-sur-Loing to the rest of the world, through a set of animated cartograms from 1903 to 2003.
The originality of this artistic work is to show not migratory flows but a formal translation of their delayed effects on territories: population dynamics are at work in the work. The movements of the earth and of people become perceptible. In doing so, the author does not seek to convey a scientific truth but a human truth: that of the meaning of history which absorbs the past and renews it through the transmission of family names.
In this civil registry shelf of Chalette-sur-Loing are recorded the names from birth and death certificates noted in the municipal registers by civil registry officers. The history of flows in an elastic world that this world city exemplifies due to its industrial history is absorbed into the shelf.
This work reflects principles dear to the artist: the attempt to give form to the intersections of individual and collective histories already present in his collective self-portraits, all viewed with optimism, humor, and self-mockery.
