Robin Touchard

Film

In the midst of a mineral landscape, a man collects minerals that he struggles to transport to the summit of Crassier, a burning artificial mountain. Alone, he sinks into the absurd struggle to keep this mutating terrestrial entity growing.

The Crassier is formed by the accumulation of mining waste, shale and coal. In 2004, a fire spread inside the slag heap. From the town of Alès, we can witness the slow combustion of this geological mutant.

Robin Touchard

Born in Toulon in 1987. 

At the age of one, Robin Touchard pulled the plug on a boiling coffee pot, which left marbled burns on his skin. He would later discover that this event forced him to create using accident. Logically, from an early age, he became heavily dependent on caffeine. In this light, it is easier to understand his themes of dripping, cliffs, waterfalls, magma, spattering, cartography, geology and memory inscribed in matter. 

The filmic, sculptural and performative gestures in Touchard’s work manifest a multicoloured chaos, a volcanic clamour that is only partly controlled by devices and collaborations. Is this plastic chaos striving to give birth to an ordered universe, as in the creation of the world? Reading the artist’s works, it seems that it is chaos itself that is being questioned. Chaos as subject, as a place of plastic speculation, a place for the loss of spatio-temporal bearings, a place for destabilisation, visual and physical vertigo, a body transformed, diffused and impacted by images, a place for the perpetual beginning of a dynamic system. 

After graduating from the École supérieure d’art et de design Marseille-Méditerranée (ESADMM) in 2013, Touchard was a resident in the City of Marseille artistic workshops for two years. Winner of the ESADMM prize in 2015, his works have entered the collections of Frédéric de Goldschmidt and Galila Barzilaï-Hollander in Brussels, and those of the FRAC Sud. After several exhibitions in France and abroad, Touchard spent almost two years in Mexico and Colombia, where he took up several residencies. He moved to Brussels in 2018 and enrolled in the École de photographie et de techniques visuelles Agnès Varda in 2020, after which he entered Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in 2022.

Production

Credits