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“It’s a great adventure,” said artist Abraham Poincheval on Saturday after he climbed out of the neck of the giant bottle in which he had locked himself 10 days earlier, near the Stade de France, where temperatures were approaching 50 degrees.
After further dialogue with passersby via a long black pipe, the artist, who took up residence in a six-meter-by-two PVC bottle moored along the Saint-Denis Canal on July 25, was brought back to the dock.
“It’s cool here,” the artist said wearily but excitedly to applause, as his sculptor father presented him with the medal for the most difficult sport while the Olympic track and field competition took place a few hundred meters away.
Up to 47 degrees
Small wind turbines and solar collectors allow the performers to generate a small amount of electricity for lighting and ventilation. Freeze-dried food and dry toilets do the rest. “When you start a piece, you never know where you’re going to go. It’s always a game I design (…). It was really a great adventure to be there,” admits the 52-year-old artist, who remembers vividly the beauty of the stormy sky and the hundreds of interactions with the public.
In fact, its unexpected appearance in the bottle triggered countless meetings, including residents, workers mobilized for the Games, tourists, the homeless and the police. During these ten days, Abraham Ponchval lived both alone and in the public eye. The day before, its battery failed, causing the ventilation and water systems to stop. “It was like the bottle said to me ‘you need to go out’,” he joked.
Despite the visor, the temperature in the bottle reached 47 degrees halfway through the day. “It was very hot. (…) We would have thought we were in the middle of the desert,” commented the artist, who would have been forced to “open the bottle” if the thermometer had reached 50 degrees. “There we really got into the idea of a performance problem, saying to ourselves (…) + We got through it and persevered,” he explained.
“The first social network”
The performance, titled “La Bouteille”, was organized to call on the regional public institutions of the Plaine Commune to develop projects that would allow the public to reclaim the canal.
“There are many stories about bottles in the ocean, for example, ecologically speaking, the first way to understand the ocean’s flows is to put bottles in the sea and see where they go (…) I find this idea very beautiful,” comments the artist, inviting everyone to “invent a message” for their performance. “The bottle is a bit like the first social network,” adds the artist who wants to question privacy and everyone’s use of public space, at a time when “many people put their lives on social networks.
The next challenge for the Ardèche
Mathieu Harnotin, the Socialist mayor of Saint-Denis, congratulated him with a bottle of champagne and offered him a ticket to the athletics event. “This performance is extraordinary because it is not banal. This object challenges us, and the artist questions our relationship with nature, waste and consumption,” he declared.
For his next show, Abraham Ponchval plans to lock himself in “a beehive in the Ardèche”. As for the bottle, he now plans to “take it on a trip to the Gulf of Tonkin”.
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