Exo Exo, Paris – Wolf Cuyvers, Château d'eau / Femme qui pleure...

Château d'eau / Femme qui pleure. Allées venues / Boulevards vides
Wolf Cuyvers

curated by Clara Guislain
part of Biennale de Belleville

Exo Exo, Paris
October 20 - October 26, 2014

press release

Wolf Cuyvers, Château d'eau / Femme qui pleure. Allées venues / Boulevards vides, 2014
Exhibition view, Exo Exo, Paris

Wolf Cuyvers, Château d'eau / Femme qui pleure. Allées venues / Boulevards vides, 2014
Exhibition view, Exo Exo, Paris

Wolf Cuyvers’s project intends to develop notions of drift and land surveying the city network like an experimental principle of poetic writing. Each walk through the city is submitted to a systematic protocol listing words, sentences, and linguistic acts. When transferred onto a map, the words progressively assemble a fictional text whose irregular and concise structure formalizes and articulates the artist's urban wanderings. This raw verbal material - fragments of vandalized words - constitutes a database that questions various situations of enunciation and conflicting appropriations of space and language.

The in-situ installation created by the artist puts in tension the factual drought of sociological statement and the meta-stable, fluctuating, and short-lived dimension of these assertions, seized in the narrowness of their own expression. He questions both the limits of the act of listing and fixing any mobile word as well as the possibilities of poetic and polyphonic organization.