My first art residency abroad. Six months both inspiring and decisive. Confronted with a society undergoing significant changes to cater to the tourism market, I initiated a collaborative process with artisans to question our relationships.
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During a family trip to Bali, I discovered a creative universe particularly oriented towards tourism, oscillating between mimicking a bygone Western art history and distorting traditional practices for commercial purposes. Building on my artist’s book Art and the Fake, I approached the Alliance Française to immerse myself in these productions that challenge notions of imitation, originality, and authenticity.
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Welcomed for a four-month artistic residency, I conducted a reflective and creative exploration, delving into the island’s complexity and hidden layers. During my photographic wanderings, I navigated streams clogged with the debris of emerging consumerism, conversed with abstract or surrealist artists primarily negotiating their certificates of authenticity, observed master sculptors repeatedly carving the same ancestral arabesques, discovered monumental galleries of mass-produced artworks, and eventually realized that printing my photographs was more expensive in a professional lab than with copyist painters.
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This journey inspired several projects. Continuing an Art Bombing initiative started in France, I purchased several paintings (by copyists or masters) to update them within a distinctly Balinese context. Focusing my lens on daily realities ignored by tourist circuits, I created postcards to compose a panorama of a hidden Bali, contrasting sharply with its mythical image as a destination. Without ever losing its identity, the island has subtly embraced the tastes and values of a globalized population.
Reflecting this world in the throes of identity transformation, inheriting the tastes and values of a globalized population, I designed sculptural graffiti as bas-reliefs on doors or stone blocks, installing them permanently on the city walls. With a certain cynicism, I repurposed some of my photographs as advertisements, playing with real estate marketing codes to expose their flaws.
Impressed by these projects, the CCCF of Surabaya invited the exhibition to Java a year later.
