Guykayser, Memories to sculpt a collective self-portrait. Véronique Dassié

AN ARTIST IN THE MIDST OF AN URBAN RENEWAL PROJECT

The disappearance of a neighborhood as part of an urban renewal project is never without friction. The loss of buildings generates the feeling of another loss, a deeply identity-related one. City policies are now aware of this, to the point of very often calling upon “memory entrepreneurs¹” to collect the memories of residents in neighborhoods destined to disappear. The collection then appears as compensation for the loss, a kind of memorial cure, reconstruction through memory allowing the sublimation of the architectural material deficit brutally imposed on the visible space of the neighborhood. Most often, the approach then consists of recreating the history of these places based on the testimonies of their inhabitants. guykayser‘s approach could therefore appear as yet another variation of these forms of social therapy through art, combining the objective of strengthening urban harmony and the valorization of stigmatized neighborhoods.

However, as the artist explains regarding the Kennedy neighborhood in Montargis, his “project is not to tell the story of a neighborhood because time does not pass quickly enough for life to change.” In fact, the characters and comments mobilized by the wheel do not so much tell the story of a neighborhood as their own story, as it unfolds in their perception of this place. Like any memorial production, “the past is not relived, but reconstructed²,” just like the neighborhood under the artist’s gaze. For its inhabitants, “Kennedy” is therefore a story that is told. Memory is worked on, cultivated there to produce a narrative that has real substance. If metaphors of memory do not fail to refer to solidity, its counterpart, oblivion, is conceived as a memory gap, a void³. However, this void is now found in the one left by the disappearance of the buildings in this neighborhood under reconstruction. The construction site implies an architectural transformation. The artist’s diachronic view of this mutation thus offers a reflection that goes beyond its event-based framework by scrutinizing the mechanisms of an ongoing identity recomposition.

To do this, the artist creates another space, that of an ephemeral installation where those who usually only meet from afar come together and are, in a way, invited to tell their stories in and around his work: the inhabitants of a neighborhood with its children and those who build it, literally and figuratively: workers, teachers, social workers or spiritual guides, but also those who observe it from afar, whether men or women, politicians, sociologists, ethnologists or architects. When you turn the wheel, you hear a voice, known or not, that of a neighbor with whom you hadn’t really had the opportunity to evoke that part of intimacy that unfolds in contact with the place, but also that of strangers, cultural action professionals or teachers also concerned by it. Alongside the simple encounter (though, how could it be simple?) between an artist and the inhabitants of a neighborhood, other encounters unfold, the result of the superposition of characters who, outside such a context, would never have the opportunity to dialogue together.

Understanding what is at stake in such an artistic production therefore invites us to revisit the artist’s own journey, and the reasons that led him to make memory the raw material of his sculptures. For before working with the psyche, guykayser honed his skills by working with solid matter.

SCULPTING MEMORIES

If guykayser sculpts memory today, it is because he previously sculpted it, solidified it in repurposed and assembled objects to create works of art. It all began the day the artist inherited a pair of wooden ladders from his grandfather. To clear out the latter’s workshop, he stored them with the wood he used as raw material for his creations. The object, initially taken as simple recycled material, nevertheless marked a turning point in his career. For ten years, the artist would indeed recover other ladders, manipulating them, dismantling them, and assembling them to make sculptures. A singular object, a simple wooden ladder, whose discovery was linked to the death of an ancestor, thus became a common thread in his creation. The ladder indeed refers him to what he is, namely a handyman and a mediator⁴ who manipulates matter with his tools, deconstructs reality to extract its meaning and offer it as a mirror to society.

The artist would subsequently continue his work on memories. The ladder experience indeed led him to observe the universality of this type of domestic preservation: “we all have objects like that, so I went to see people, I told them, you have an object, tell me its story, and that’s it, I started from objects and stories⁵,” he explains. As he collected stories, he realized that “every little piece of story told can be [his] own story⁶.” Accessing the memory of others via an ordinary object calls for mutual understanding, the possibility of finding oneself in the memory of another. The composition resulting from the assembly of stories will form a common portrait to which everyone will have contributed.

These “collective self-portraits,” as guykayser calls them, gradually take on meaning in relation to the territory in which the artist operates. On his daily bicycle commute to his studio, he experiences both a physical and social transition: “pedaling, I suddenly saw myself passing from Chalette, an industrial, working-class town, and arriving in the city center of Montargis. On this very short stretch of road, I went from one world to another, which I connected to my family because my father came from a bourgeois family while my mother came from a working-class background.” If the object dissolves into history for the benefit of the territory, the biographical returns to consider not the object but places. Along the canal, architectural or natural spaces succeed one another, reinjected into the work through images. By moving, an entire social experience thus erupts into consciousness, the definition of oneself as a composite individual then becoming perceptible in the crossing of different social universes, themselves perceptible in the transformations of the surrounding landscape.

These three stages in the artist’s journey allowed him to make memory a true creative material. First with the ladders, matter offered itself as a malleable memory, then in a second stage, the recounted memory allowed the creation of a “collective self-portrait” to finally, in a third stage, give form to places, true landscapes of memory.

FROM THE DILUTION OF THE OBJECT IN THE MEMORY OF THE PLACE

This artistic and personal journey questions the materiality of the work and the use of memory in its outcome. In the first stage, the very substance of the souvenir object nourishes the creation. In the second stage, the multiplication of objects brings forth the nuanced palette of a discursive range. The material thing absorbs the individual who projects himself into a space traversed by the presence of others. Its collective scope, in the manner of Georges Perec’s Je me souviens⁷, then expresses itself through collection, the accumulation of objects captured by photography from various individuals, giving “the world a reconstituted identity⁸” perceptible through interactive objects supported by the internet. In the third stage, the mobile object disappears in favor of an architectural or landscape space, matter restored by the image, in which individual social paths are inscribed.

Is the relationship between memory and matter not constitutive of all artistic work? This is certainly the case for Daniel Spoerri’s sentimental museums, which “use objects as vehicles of emotions and memories, and thus of history⁹.” Memory, an intangible and shifting material, is shaped by guykayser to create an interactive work. As Julie Bouchard noted about him, these “lively, moving words, vibrant with emotion and memory, he carved them as he would have carved wood, glass, acrylic or metal¹⁰.” But with the memories of the inhabitants collected in a neighborhood of the Montargis agglomeration, the memory captured through discourse reveals with particular acuity the permanent interplay between matter and memory. Memory would indeed be, according to André Bergson, “the point of intersection between mind and matter¹¹,” which the ladder had in some way revealed to the artist a few years earlier. While memory escapes direct perception, the artifact gave tangible form to the intangible. But the solidity of memory ultimately dissolves into words and into the conditions of the work’s exhibition, which for guykayser involves a digital medium. However, matter makes a return through the inscription of the artistic project in a territory. While the work exists only as a largely ephemeral trace, it offers a re-reading of the memories that constitute it, this collective self-portrait that the CD-ROM fossilizes.

THE COLLECTIVE SELF-PORTRAIT, THE BEAUTY OF A COMMON SENSE

The notion of portrait as guykayser reinvents it is not insignificant. Somewhat hastily, one might say that the artist simply seeks to give form to the identity of a place. However, the quest for identity as it is most often conceived appears absent from his project. guykayser never dwells on the classic frameworks of identity affiliations, whether ethnic, political, or religious. If his work questions biographical transitions, inter-individual and social boundaries, he never follows the thread of origins and roots to anchor himself in the present: “I want to capture the moment when we are together, it’s not my job to reconstruct the why and how everyone got there,” he explains, for example, about the witnesses met in the Montargis region, all of whom are migrants from a more or less distant elsewhere.

The less visible side of the artist’s work reveals the importance of this anchoring in the present. If it is not about drawing the canvas of the multiple paths that can lead different individuals to the same place, it is indeed about grasping the convergence of time and space in the here and now. This intertwining of paths and the superposition of testimonies produces a composite but very much alive being. And when the wheel stops, you can see the place, more or less familiar, that produced this collective while also being its product. If this place is a “sensitive neighborhood,” as public rumor describes it, it is therefore primarily in the literal sense within the artistic device thanks to the emotions it arouses in those who inhabit it, pass through it, and live in it. This neighborhood, a priori banal to the point of being able to partly disappear and be forgotten, thus resonates in memories.

With “You gain by being known,” the images of a neighborhood in the Montargis agglomeration, the portraits of those who bring it to life, think about it, and build its future contribute to defining it differently. It is no longer just a “non-place” of collective memory in the sense Marc Augé envisioned¹² but a recrystallization of the urban despite the ambient memorial cacophony. The artist says he wants to try to “reconstruct the beauty of meaning.” But what meaning can be given to such an approach? How can it be made relevant, both for those who participate from within and those who see it from afar?

THE PROOF BY ABSURDITY

In this nod to the inhabitants of the “Kennedy neighborhood,” a socially stigmatized area, the artist humorously plays with the encounter between the aesthetic canons of Vitruvian Man, a perfect being drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, and the repurposing of a game like the wheel of fortune. The playful dimension of the approach is essential. It is not just about making the project accessible to everyone by diverting popular registers, humor, and self-deprecation. Everyone, explains guykayser, “must agree to play by the rules,” “all have agreed to be cut into pieces.” The absurdity of such a fragmentation of individualities must be related to the images of the neighborhood itself. In these images, matter makes an imposing return. Its prevalence is all the more expressed as humans never appear in them. No living being, therefore, to signify human architecture, whether it is there, invasive in its monumental symmetry, disappearing under the action of excavators, or under construction. Life nevertheless emerges in hollow, through its absence and in the stories that unfold through the projections: “it is the voice that inhabits the images,” explains the artist. But the words of the witnesses would be little without the impact of the photographs that accompany them. These speak as much as the voices, reconstructing the three stages of the artist’s project: the discovery of a neighborhood, under snow, the destruction of inert matter, and finally its construction. Their purpose is not to make individualities perceptible. They further fuel the self-portrait. The void of characters is replaced by an urban “landscape” that changes and transforms over three years. In the first year, 2009, this landscape appears monumental, made of symmetry and inertia: a square building, with satellite dishes on the facade, white walls, snow reinforcing the illusion of a naturally black and white landscape, somehow imbued with a nostalgia for the past that it would ultimately embody. Then, in 2010, it was time for demolitions. Traces of life do not appear more than before, but movement emerges through that of excavators which, like gigantic prehistoric beings, devour the architectural matter. Matter thus comes to the forefront of a demolition seen from within. The exterior landscape is indeed perceptible through windows, ruined interiors. It is also and above all seen in close-up, with an almost molecular attention paid to decomposing concrete, scrap metal, and glass. Finally, the time for reconstruction arrives. 2011 thus marks the return of order but in a more whimsical way than in 2009, arranged without an abuse of symmetries. The colors, those of construction paints, plastic sheaths of various pipes, construction machines, somehow signify the playful scope of the ongoing fabrication.

It is this decomposition-recomposition that paints the portrait by the artist. As Michel Beaujour emphasizes, the self-portrait is indeed in its rhetoric a “polymorphous formation much more heterogeneous and complex than autobiographical narration¹³.” In other words, it is not a linear narrative, nor even a quest for origins; it is, on the contrary, the juxtaposition of pictorial fragments which, placed side by side, ultimately contribute to making sense. Dissociated from each other, these fragments are merely valueless matter. Assembled, they form a coherence.

The collective self-portrait created by guykayser cannot therefore be seen as the production of an alterity confined to the sphere of the neighborhood and its inhabitants, but as that of a “look at what we are, all of us, here and outside the neighborhood,” with our shared memory and the meaning we give it.