Work Zones (Re-Chantier) is a construction site-inspired group exhibition involving textile surfaces and live art multimedia performance by Lise Serra, Kasia Ozga, Philippe Fontès, Serge Valla, dancers Caitlyn Schrader, and kt williams. The initial collaborators met in Saint-Étienne, France. In their ever-evolving body of work, static sewn artworks are activated via sound art, video projection, and performance gestures. Pieces in the collective project written, sewn, assembled, and projected by individual contributors; however, each element is also in constant flux, influenced by the moving, changing works around it. The total audio-visual artwork explores how the act of construction delimits and organizes space and time. Inspired by the academic research of architect and urbanist Lise Serra., the project emerges from confrontations between direct observations, physical residues, and analytic assessments of construction sites.
Kasia Ozga’s textiles revolve around the notions of work and human presence. The “Blue Collar”
surface-canvases, as well as the flags from the “Sky Exchange” series produced since 2021, feature
used workwear to create abstract graphic compositions at different scales. Video artist Philippe
Fontès creates large-scale site-specific projections from found objects. His live bricolage performances during previous presentations of Re-Chantier at the Giardi Gallery in Saint-Étienne, France, used a variety of untraditional analog and digital recording devices to film material fragments sourced from construction sites that were physically manipulated in real time, with immersive video projected over the gallery’s walls. Sound artist Serge Valla, remixes found and pre-recorded samples from work sites with live sound from Fontès’ actions and Serra’s text read by the author and simultaneously translated by Ozga. His electro-acoustic improvisations extract sounds from various environments at once and the resulting spatialized sound is then fed back into the exhibition space during live performances and recorded for future use.
The multimedia project is an ongoing conversation between physical materials, spoked word, and
analog and digital media. The four collaborators approach the site of construction from different
frames of reference and the project is a site for experimentation and exploration of the logic and
aesthetics of making at an industrial scale. The artwork explores the materials and labor behind
building the built environment.