The Alice Games

Like a thoughtful mockery, Aurélie’s proposals invite us to explore a world of paradoxes that generate micro-fictions. There is the Vs Park (2012), a small community of colourful shapes spread over a circumscribed ground. They are rodent cages deserted by their inhabitants, a chaotic, short-lived mass generated by the most invasive and harmful everyday material, plastic.

Recovery and reuse throughout, two constant gestures in Aurélie’s proposals, for Nécropolis (2016), a city of the dead according to the etymology, coloured and recycled waste are arranged on shelves, like so many visual resonances of an alignment of offerings for the dead.

This poetic element of the gap which “monumentalizes” the traces, the relics, of a slightly disenchanted daily life plays with the dimensions. The shelf-pedestals vary in size but are always in tension with those of improbable ex-votos, a game at the origin of the weirdness that disrupts an expected familiarity. The Blues Platform (2015) is the size of the space that hosts it but at the same time it saturates this space, another way of disrupting the dimensions, as does Superfétatoire (2014). The two proposals bring together the world of entertainment, the stands of an amphitheatre, of a performance hall, and the arena of a circus; both invite visitors to simulate, or evoke, a performance. The words highlight the invitation.“Blues” suggests a colour of course but the s is the echo of the music which shapes sadness, which re-enchants disenchantment.

Aurélie’s world is constructed of discreet touches and gestures that summon everyday materials, colours, words, devices and a game of scale to rethink the world like Alice, her fictional sister. An invitation to step through the looking-glass.