maquettes-sans-qualité. Travail en grève / Work on strike

When the hostility amidst which we live keeps us, for so many reasons, from completing our projects and defers our blossoming indefinitely, it’s likely that we will only be able to live our disorders in burrowing towards not yet untrampled depths.

A maquette is a miniature model of a theater set, of a building, of an architectural ensemble. But a maquette can also be a sketch, an escape plan, a miniaturized model of a space where one can speak, think about the world and ourselves within it; a model without guarantees, of a refuge, a sum of rudiments for the building of an inhabitable place whose birth would be long and complicated.
A maquette cannot be imposed, it does not claim posterity, but rather a congruity with the present. It contains its own negation, its own destruction as a possibility, as the constitutive principle of its meaning, it can easily be undone and redone. Because of this lightness, it also retains a capacity to survive through hard times, to maintain its potentials for more propitious moments. It protects within itself a fragile balance between what it is not yet and what it could be, because a shining future cannot be dictated, just as freedom should not remain an immutable idea.

The maquettes-sans-qualité are the form that has been given to an imaginary space, a refuge that leaves room for the multiple voices brought into play by the corpus of an unfinished work of artistic practices. This space, opened up in 1995 under the title Un problème non résolu, < 1995 – … >, vues partielles, has taken the form of discontinuous arrangements of photographs and captions, texts, video documents for consultation and narratives of practices. If it does not seem urgent to speak of the author or authors of a work that has gone on strike, it is perhaps because “it is necessary to abandon the author as selfevident, and rediscover it as a problem.” And also because “the word ‘work’ and the unity it designates are probably as problematic as the individuality of the author.”
The unresolved problems which we are facing are never suffered alone, and their after-effects, even when invisible, are in the air. There would be a kind of incoherency in seeking above all to identify the single, principal author, rather than identifying the problems…, an incoherency in claiming sole ownership of the description of the common problems that make up the everyday life in which we are submerged.
Sometimes we find ourselves alongside an event, sometimes we are caught up in it, sometimes we are simply informed of “what happened”, sometimes we think we were absent from the scene of the drama, and most often today we have the impression of being kept at a distance from any event whatsoever. Yet we are many to think that there is something “odd” going on, many to wonder what’s wrong with this picture, where the answers are, what to do, etc.

The men and women who make things here do not necessarily bear the traces of their work on their faces, just as a photographer can cease taking photographs in order to produce images. A woman-photographer is cited as a pseudonym. A photographer, who might also have been a nurse or a sweeper, and their gazes on the world (or that cafe waiter about whom it has been written that he is and is not all at once, whose voice would probably have been heard if, in face of the philosopher, he had stopped acting). Photographer-nurse-sweeper, cited not as socioprofessional categories but as their overcoming, their alteration.
What must be done is always in a state of becoming, and in the reworking of presuppositions. A woman-photographer is many at once, and it is in this plurality that the gestures lie, the acts carried out with other men and women, whoever. There, too, reside the meanings opened up by the anarchitecture of the maquettes-sans-qualité.