Mes installations recréent un univers urbain fait d’éléments empruntés au réel, et miniaturisés par la photographie. Ils sont agencés comme dans un jeu de construction dont on organise les éléments avec les hésitations ou les certitudes intuitives de l’improvisation. Ces arrangements et les objets qui les composent devraient agir comme supports de méditation, autant sur la forme du contenant que sur ce qu’elle abrite.

looking through

Since the late 1990s, Manuel Salvat’s work has focused on the idea of the city : conceiving of the urban fabric as a proliferating organism, Salvat selects diverse architectural elements and presents them for our view. The resulting multilayered work offers the viewer numerous points of access.

Although he is interested in architecture’s role as shelter, Salvat looks beyond the fact that architectural forms are also a barrier. His work takes the wall’s function as obstacle and transforms it into a means to reflect upon the human community that composes the city. In this sense, “looking through” means crossing through walls to reach others. Salvat has generated a grand utopia of community and fellowship, even while acknowledging that this utopia can only exist in his own re-fabricated world.
   Wires criss-cross his structures, held up with small, real electrical boxes or representations of power pylons. The wires cross through the walls themselves, evoking the ways in which we are irremediably connected-for example, through our similarities and through the consequences of our acts-while at the same time, pointing out how we are, paradoxically, shut in and partitioned off : our minds within our bodies, our bodies within our walls.

Manuel Salvat’s approach is not purely mechanical, however he takes a distinct delight in scrambling his own data. He erects an entire urban universe within the museum’s walls, installing a multitude of miniaturized buildings that appear to have been shrunk specially to fit into this single container. The museum, by contrast, suddenly appears oversized, a vast space now hosting entire esplanades, wastelands, avenues and highways.

Upon closer inspection, some of these indeterminate surfaces turn out to be specific places, “angles” or “corners”-chunks of rooms lifted directly out of their associated apartments. Photographed and enlarged on a scale of 1, the floors and walls of these corners make an incongruous eruption within the public arena of the museum, a sudden emergence of the private sphere. Salvat’s Angles and Meubles-Immeubles-hybrid objects that are both buildings and the raw elements of furniture-help effect this scrambling of boundaries. Theirs is a sensitive, mental game of back-and-forth : from inside to outside, from private space to public space, and back again.

And sometimes, lingering in front of one of the buildings, one notices something happening : a vibration arises from within the dwellings, a soundtrack of rumbling subways and humming refrigerators. At another spot, something has been produced-the buildings have secreted substances, they have fabricated materials. It is as if the artist wants to reinforce the illusion that the objects he makes and arranges are in fact autonomous, as if he longs to believe they are inhabited by their own miniature life. Are we seeing the collective production of the building’s inhabitants ? Or is this the building’s own energy ?

Angèle Assia, 2007
  translated by Ann O’Connor