Grrrrruuurrrrrurrrr
It is after two days of endless driving that I reach Djurs Sommerland, an amusement park at the north-eastern end of Denmark. Surrounded by fields and fir trees, suffocated by the sadness of our confined time, the Petro Art production team was expecting my arrival for the start of what will become a challenge: Dinosaurland, a new attraction with the theme of dinosaurs and rocks.
In the middle of a huge wasteland, the railed structure of a roller coaster. In the background, a papier-mache gorilla waits on the slab of a building under construction. Let’s imagine a rocky environment for the outside, and a cave for a jeep safari.
The client is demanding but not sure of the desired design. Neither the team, incomplete, nor the material, unavailable, will prevent the validation of a sample made with means as paleolithic as the expected result.
After some time, finally, the work starts for real. On paper, my role as “leading artist” is to supervise the team on the final aesthetic result. In the field, I deal with all aspects of the project: design, sculpture, methodology, management and others.
As in any respectable construction site with its many obstacles, which make the daily life more exciting and put the nerves of the supervisor to the test, the rocks will nevertheless have found their shapes and their -vivid- colors after about ten weeks. Perched on their rocks, thanks to robotics, animatronic dinosaurs will come to animate the decor to give it a Jurassik Park touch.
If travel shapes the youth, and the meeting with other cultures can enrich the mind, the work abroad with a multi-identity team is an outstanding experience. In this short workcamp, but punctuated by many hazards, I had three teams of different nationalities to manage in turn. If the work remains the same, the words and the ways of doing things change, with the consequence of serious misunderstandings, difficult moments, but above all, a lot of laughter. Memories that leave their mark and underline that the human and cultural aspects of the detached workers are not to be neglected in the completion of a project.
Not long ago, I was interviewed at the Gare de Nantes by a local journalist. The journalist asked me how to best describe my contribution to the concrete tree sculpture; as an artist or an artisan? Normally, this type of question would have left me speechless, had I not thankfully prepared a very polite, very vague answer:
“we are a bit of both”