Uncanny

When I arrived at the Dirty Art department, the most recent project I made was “TADAM” (also called BIG HEADS); two giant wearable heads. One portrait of my friend David Bekic and one auto-portrait. The idea came from the intention to find a way of performing in the city of Paris. After the several lockdowns, it felt important to generate human contact again, and the multiple street performances that were invented to show people in the streets of Paris were bringing a new way of coming together again. Jazz concerts, drag performances from the balcony, Brazilian dances, the city found its tricks to produce an autonomous way of bringing culture back to the daily landscape while theaters, cinemas and museums were still closed.

David and I were questioning ourselves on how to be part of it. Originally we wanted to perform some songs played with the guitar and by asking what the perfect costume would be for this performance, we came to the conclusion that the best costume is our own body. In order to make fun of that reflection, the amplification of our heads as an auto-caricature came naturally. I think I was undirectly influenced by the show “Les Guignols de l’Info” I used to watch with my dad when I was a child. It’s a satirical show about the french political landscape where all the characters are caricatural muppets.

The self-mockery of wearing its own big head responding also to the french expression “avoir la grosse tête” (having a bighead would mean that you’re having a big ego, that you’re a pretentious person) was supposed to question the status of being an artist but was also in a way a celebration of wearing your own body with a friend in a city where everybody walks anonymously in the streets. The street becomes an open stage for performing this big head walk and produced for most of the people we met through it, the feeling that they also wanted to have their own head to parade with. In the end, I think I tried to give the idea that daily life can also be a parade through a celebration of ourselves. That “reality” is also a place where fascination can happen, as much as Phillippe Quesne in order to promote his show “Welcome to Caveland” made his actors walk with their mole costumes through the metro of Paris to the Theater Les Amandiers where the show was being played.

If David Lynch and Twin Peaks, has the capacity of entering my dreams, influence my perception of reality and feelings, why not enter «daily life» in the same way? Making exist absurd and uncanny situations in the streets as if it came straight out of a screen and keep experimenting about what is real or fictional, physical or virtual and maybe to some extent, what is art and not.

In that sense artists are not people that choose between the two supposed opposite things, but have the capacity like the «funambule» from Jean Genet to walk on the thin line between notions, styles, countries, genders and make them exist together in one or multiple works.

I choose cardboard to make the heads, that insert them a bit more in the history of the big scaled carnival costumes. Light, easy to manipulate, transport, wear and cheap and easy to find on any corner of a street, especially with the huge increase of delivery companies. For those reasons, I decided to master my craft in cardboard shaping for almost an entire year since I entered this program at the Sandberg Institute. It was also a good way for me to volumize my drawings and make them have a physical existence in spaces.

(extract from “Meeting Lines” by Hugo Beheregaray, thesis for Dirty Art Department Masters in 2023)