Maps & Mazes

2 drawings, pencil, print, 2018- 2020

Maps & Mazes is a series of drawings that take place on different buses. The leitmotif, of this series, is the gesture of my hand on a sheet of paper, a defined space, within another space, the bus. Its rhythmic cadence during he journey pushes my body to follow its motion.

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What happens when we put pencil to paper during this trajectory? My hand accepts, without any resistance, the motion created by the bus. My hand and body act as a pendulum of a seismograph retranscribing an external vibration. The body contempts itself to transmit. (Le corps, sismographe d'une vibration extérieure, se contente de transmettre.)

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The resulting outcome is a series of drawings, constituted by lines that seem to mesh and create a map and/or a maze.

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A strange paradox where it is the machine, and more specifically its motion, that creates the drawing by constraining my body to follow its movement and, hence, triggering a mechanical drawing as if an I was an automated machine, and not me, the human. Each line is created by one trajectory from, either, my house to the university, or, from the university back to my house. My body, here, take on a role of a sensitive medium, transcribing the way the bus driver drives. Whether the driving is aggressive and rushing, or smooth and calm, the lines drawn are different: some are smoother than others. The gestures become, in a way, involuntary and unconscious.

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Each trajectory is recorded on a different piece of paper. The nine resulting drawings were then superimposed, at a very slow pace, in a slideshow that is, then, projected.