Florence Doléac

Collective siesta

2007

13 painted wooden pickets, 15 hammocks in nylon nets, 13 nylon umbrellas

Collective siesta is a siesta system in the form of a ramification which, when placed in a public park, suggests a little collective siesta for 15 people, mixing drowsiness and conversations depending on the place chosen, depending on how it swings, and what it wants.

Florence Doléac sets her work in an interstitial space where design hobnobs with art, and where presentation and production methods waver between a system that is both commercial and institutional. The fact that she lays claim to this not very common stance endows her with a specific identity. The fact is that not only does Florence Doléac introduce a tension between production and exhibition, with answers that brim with wit and poetry, but she also develops a line of questioning about function and its contrasting counterpart: uselessness. Her proposals and ideas sidestep established codes in order to upset the way we usually perceive things; she intercepts our gestures by putting a finger on their limits. The incongruousness of the various situations thus created refers us to our own imagination, thus lightening a reality that is far too straitjacketed.