fleuryfontaine
Ange - Installation - 2019
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 21
Installation
Ange is the product of the relationship between two artists and a “hikikomori”. This term, imported from Japan and without any equivalent in France, refers to children, and sometimes even adolescents, who choose not to leave their rooms or their apartment for months or even years at a time. This is the case with Ael, who has shut himself away in a hut in the garden of the family home for 13 years, somewhere in the South of France.
The artistic duo fleuryfontaine were in touch with him via internet, and used the medium of the video game to attempt to recreate the universe of this “hikikomori” and engage in conversation during gaming sessions, when Ael moves around in environments created by his two correspondents. Through his room, the objects in it, the parental home and his neighbourhood, this film reveals the fragmentary portrait of a man who has withdrawn from the world.
fleuryfontaine
fleuryfontaine is an artistic duo whose work explores the positions we each occupy in the neo-liberal, artificial and security-driven environments that condition our behaviour, our bodies and our relation to the world and to others. Their work also takes the form of installations, sculptures and performances as well as digitally generated images. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais (ENSA Paris-Malaquais) in 2008, Galdric Fleury and Antoine Fontaine continued their studies at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) in 2010. That is where they began working exclusively in a duo by the name of fleuryfontaine. Selected for the Salon de Montrouge in 2015, and then for Jeune Création at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac later that year, they alternate residencies (Bruges, Seoul, London, Lisbon, Tokyo, etc.) and exhibitions in venues as diverse as Les Grands Voisins, isthisit? and the Maison Populaire in Montreuil.
Production
Acknowledgments
Ael, Frédéric Weigel et Yoshiko Suto (le Palais des paris, Takasaki, Japon), Maïa Fansten, Cristina Figueiredo, Natacha Vellut, Constantin Dubois Choulik et Pauline Descamps.
