Programming
GIORGIA VOLPE
The Patio Swing
For her participative project, she chose to install a patio swing on the site of DARE-DARE. This emblematic object of popular culture becomes here a friendly platform of investigation on dialogue and intersubjectivity. Throughout this installation in Saint-Henri, this patio swing will be perpetually transformed and will undergo multiple mutations before returning to the backyard in the Villeray district, where it comes from.
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Meeting with the artist and closing event at DARE-DARE, Saturday August 5th, 2017, 5 to 7.
During this project, I want to create an interstitial location in the city by proposing a relational object that can be used as a common space. My intention is to use an object of Quebec's popular culture and transform it into a platform for investigation on dialogue and intersubjectivity. This household furniture, which is usually installed on the terraces or in the courtyard of homes and centers for the elderly, consists of two benches facing each other. Its back-and-forth movement invites us to take a break from our incessant daily activities and to bring our thoughts and dreams into our relationship with each other. The swing becomes a relational device for exploring and archiving different forms of intersubjectivity in the urban space. Displaced from its usual context, it invents within the city a privileged space where everything can happen, where the individual and the community can interact, following the circular rhythm.
The passerby will be invited to take place in this unusual public space. Punctuating the flow of the city by a beneficial break time, the swing could also ve viewed as a rowing boat, a lodge, a wish tree, a tea room or even more.
According to the person who will activate it, the envy or the imagination of the one who will live it and according to the present moment, the swing will follow its own rhythm and will have the capacity to transform itself during the spontaneous meetings it generates.
In addition to all the participants, Giorgia Volpe would like to thank: Céline Le Merlus and Alexandre Payer, Florencia Sosa Rey, Phil Allard, Christine Comeau, Noémi McComber, Martin Dufrasne, Mathieu Lacroix, Guillaume La Brie and Véronique Lépine, Jean-François, Joaquim and Maxime Boisvert, the children of the day camp (Koralie, Accacia, Nicolas, Erwan, Jaspar, Theodore, Joan, Alice), Première Moisson and DARE-DARE for their valuable involvement in the project The Patio Swing.
Artist's approach
My polymorphic practice focuses on the various realities of the body and my relationship with the environment. The nature of my creative process is based on recovery, appropriation, intervention and contextualization of the objects and the materials resulting from everyday uses. I propose interventions and actions in places of passage, especially situated between indoor and outdoor; the individual and the collective; the private and the public; the real and the imaginary. Two parallel and complementary axes characterize my plastic research; 1st, a social nature, consisting of punctual and ephemeral interventions in different contexts and communities and 2nd, a more intimate research (drawing, installations, video, photographs) that focuses on the sensorial and emotional memory. I see my works, consisting of interventions, ephemeral and perennial public projects as a way of transformation and diversion.
