Can sculpture also serve a purpose and have a second life? What is the boundary between art and design, necessity, utility, functionality, and contemplation? What are the differences between an idea and a drawing? Some of these questions will be at the heart of this training, with possible answers related to social, economic, and fashion-related issues.
When our practices change, our uses are modified, and vice versa. The recycling of objects or furniture will allow us to address this set of questions through the concept of "functional sculpture," which raises the possibilities of "living with," which concerns and emphasizes the possibility of living differently. Through this transformation, participants are invited to explore their own way of approaching objects, their histories, spaces, from furnishing to architecture, while addressing the fundamental question of the canvas to put into perspective the value of the stories it conveys and our heritage.
From the object to the model, we will use drawing as a tool to relearn how to look. We will think and create our own work based on an existing object, which we will have chosen beforehand, loved, adopted, in order to give it new meaning while questioning its status, format, shapes, and deformations.
Nathalie Elemento studied painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which she joined in 1982. Her interest in drawing and sculpture soon became apparent. In 1992, at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques along with Pontus Hulten, Daniel Buren, Sarkis, and Serge Fauchereau, her work took shape. She then integrated in 1993 the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medicis, as a resident "sculptor."
"My work, in general, is a reflection on "interior furniture": on the objects that inhabit us, the mental postures we adopt or that make us capable or not of adaptation. It is a simple work of sculpture with the table as an ideal base and all the concerns related to a work of volume but in the "in-between". It is by no means a work of design in which practice is at work, but rather a work of correspondence in which the possibilities (the ways of approaching situations) of each person are tried out: the extension, the table, the drawer, the desk are common spaces but which are felt as various specific situations. My work is an attempt at representation: the opposite of staging or an installation. I develop the concept of "sculpture of use", not practical at all but quite practicable, where the history of the gaze is that of memory. My sculptures are true "interior architectures" that mix elements of furniture, from "inhabited" and "housing", and other objects of use whose meaning I question. It is a work that raises the possibilities of living with them, first through the gaze and then through the possible uses that may be experienced and approached. I am more specifically interested in the etymology of the intimate, which is the "most inward", the "most essential" (language). Beyond everyday life, it is our capacity for "inner" adaptation (the "locus-dit", the "Decorum") that interests me by questioning our way of approaching certain functions of objects. I have also worked on the constructions and personal arrangements (psychic and physical) that we all have to create to live and survive. First through "decorum" ("convenience" in English) and its forms and then its distortion concerning each other. The substance, the form, the format, or formatting: we are confronted with "undergoing" to then better transcribe and retransform, accumulating cultural, sentimental, psychic, familial, political data that we then have to reorder. “