Installation

restitution of participative-demo The Imprinted

2017-2021 (still in progress)

 

Exchange your skin!

Since 2017, this participative-demo offers the opportunity to participate in the creation of a piece of jewelry to bequeath to a stranger. This collection explores the idea of the contribution of others in the constitution of the self, while questioning the idea of the self-made man. What is the role of the other in the formation of our identity? Is it through others that we find ourselves? 

 

"It is a question of loving oneself, by accepting to lose one of the most fundamental illusions: that of being the origin of oneself. It is a matter of becoming aware of and accepting the fact that what I call "me" is a compound of indefinitely numerous forces that I discover as they arise, and of which I am not the source. My only freedom is to push them away or to welcome them; to say yes, or to say no; to love the being that gives itself, and that I call "me", or to reject it."
       - Denis Marquet, philosopher and novelist

During events (vernissage, studio open house, creators' markets...), I propose this participative demo to passers-by who wish to do so: to take an imprint of a part of their skin (which they will have chosen to represent them) using a silicone paste. In these silicone molds, I pour directly molten tin to mount the prints in pins. All the jewelry making is done live, in front of the participants and the strollers. The people who have participated in the impression taking randomly pick another brooch and leave with a piece of skin of a stranger: a small piece of him that he has bequeathed, in the form of a brooch, to proudly display on oneself. An emotional dimension is created with this object, because the person has experienced the same process and knows that he has thought about what he wanted to give, to transmit of himself. Humanistic jewelry made in a tribute to all our encounters with strangers who have shaped us without knowing it.

Today, more than fifty people have participated in this experience over the past three years.

 

(The photos show the installation adapted to my workshop, depending on your room and material, I can make the installation evolve and propose another composition. If the exhibition is virtual, I propose an ebook which also restores this project. If the format is not suitable, it is also possible to change it).

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Involving the visitor, the curious, the public in the making of the jewel is a way to install another relationship with the object: to go beyond being a simple spectator so that his body is engaged in a process of creation.  And thus to make him intervene in the process makes it possible to change the glance that this one carries on the object and makes it possible to bring it to ask questions which intersect those of the jeweller (and the creative on a broader scale). It is a question of privileging a convivial intervention, centered on the experiment, and of creating relational, of the exchange. 

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In the participative-demo The Imprinted, visitors can take an active part in the making of the jewel by choosing a part of their skin to be molded. The skin is the carrier of our memory. Some traces are hereditary: skin color and texture, freckles, moles. Other marks come from our experience: wrinkles that deepen over the days, accidents that leave a scar, in duration that settles in reaction to a repeated gesture. Some traces fade, others remain. This memory of our skin then becomes the testimony of our history. The chosen part symbolizing the participants, they start to think about if it is figurative, recognizable like a nail, a scar or on the contrary an abstract part like folds of skin. A poetry of the epidermis emerges, of the body observed in its detail.

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It is a question here of giving a small piece of oneself and receiving a small piece of a stranger in return to wear in the form of a jewel.