Vacance
Installation, 1998

Vacance was an intervention which happened in a disused funeral house located in a shopping center in Ivry, a popular suburban area south of Paris.
The space was left in the state where it had been provided : empty and dusty. Just three dummies made out of clothes found in the garbage around were displayed and the light was left on night and day.


The former funeral house was not the place of power (corporation, university, TV studio) which would have allowed the optimal level of subversion, but it provided a kind of relevence, considering the place (vacant store, empty box, casket) as well as the time period (right after the holidays). By emphasizing the double and opposite meaning of the French word vacance - plural meaning holidays while singular means vacancy - and by occupying a place devoted to the death business, the context allows to assume absence, emptyness, vacancy as a critical attitude towards an environment which denies any form of loss.


 
Shopping center, Ivry-sur-Seine/F, september 1998
Curated by Beata Malmquist (Venividi, Paris)