Gabriel Massan

How Do I Get There?

Animation, video, 12'34'', 2024

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Gabriel Massan’s How Do I Get There? is an open-ended question: how do you get to a desired location, how do you organize your travel and take advantage of existing infrastructures if you don’t quite have the means, be they cultural, financial or physical? In an environment viewed simultaneously from three angles – a style akin to gaming, a universe of which the artist exploits the codes and the vocabulary – tall, gangly figures with excessively long, mobile limbs seem to converse. Seemingly made of clay, with the faces of multicolored butterflies and a mixture of Japanese, tribal and pre-Columbian motifs, these figures communicate in an expressive sign language, their vast gestures almost too lively and uncontrolled, matching the burgeoning organic architecture that surrounds them. They seem to be making a decision: to move about on this strange flying object that taunts them, to roam the space as they please, intoxicated by speed. Joined by a third character, we witness the trio’s conquest of the cosmic desert of pastel rhizomes. Once they have gained their freedom, the three characters surf and soar over this strange desert, accompanied by fireflies and shooting stars. This work allegorizes a social reality with which Massan is well acquainted: depending on one’s point of departure (geographical as well as physical or psychological), reaching or even just choosing a destination is not always easy.  How Do I Get There? asks the artist. Although this question does not resonate in the same way in the city as in the countryside, in Switzerland as in Bulgaria, in Brazil, or in Vietnam, it is, in the end, probably to be answered with the same courage shown here by the three little characters.

Produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, Geneva for the Mire program