Lo inverso es recíproco

Monday night, 11:30 pm, I'm on the boulevard, sitting on a bench. At midnight I head home. As a ritual, I always begin my projects on Monday nights; it lets me demold before the weekend. The street is fairly crowded, full of people and noisy, nothing unusual in the center of Paris. I watch the passersby who also watch me, and in their furtive glances I catch a curiosity mixed with a certain unease. It's true, my appearance doesn't exactly inspire trust. I'm alone, dressed in black, and I carry two huge shopping bags at my feet, packed with everything I need for my nocturnal work, including a thick rope sticking out of one of them. On top of that, I'm drinking a beer to relax, so people must take me for a bum or a thief. In any case, a shady guy about to do something wrong. A couple, rushing past, look at me with fear. This time, the discomfort I was already feeling turns into reproach and judgment, as if they had guessed what was next on my agenda and were accusing me of wanting to throw myself into such an adventure. My level of Paranoia rises, Adrenaline and Fear add up to it. Classic, that cocktail often accompanies me on my nightly expeditions, the intensity varying depending on the objectives set. Tonight, the intensity couldn't be higher. The PAF cocktail is a stimulant: it boosts my analytical capacity and reactivity, sharpens my senses, except my sight, since I'm nearsighted, but I'd rather die than wear glasses. Do I have the right to do what I'm about to do? Is it good? Is it bad? Of course I have the right, of course it's good, it's even a brilliant idea, it's my truth in this lying world. Marcel Duchamp said all artists live with the illusion of being geniuses; that's what gives meaning and wonder to their lives. I'm willing to believe it, but just this once I do think my idea really is brilliant. Anyway, it's almost midnight, I've got to go, and I'm starting to feel the urge to take a shit, possibly a side effect of the PAF cocktail. Not the right time, I try not to think about it. I grab my bags and head toward the gate of the park along the boulevard. I wait for the cars and pedestrians to pass, then jump over. A little further on, in the dark, there's a big wall; that's the second obstacle. I get close to it, it must be around five meters high. Out of the bag I take the rope and grappling hook; my goal is to latch onto one of the bars at the very top of the wall. Once I manage that, I tie both bags to my left foot with another rope and begin to climb. Once on top, I use the rope I tied to my foot to pick the bags up. A few meters away there's a small opening, the only way through. I squeeze through, careful not to get caught on the barbed wire protecting the access. On the other side of the gate, I just need to jump down, since the ground level is higher. Done, I'm inside the cemetery.

Almost instantly the urge to shit overwhelms me, it's now or never. I do what I need among the tombs and laugh as I shit, laugh even harder imagining the guard catching me with his flashlight, frozen like an animal in car headlights. Relieved, I head toward my target, staying alert. The deeper I go into the cemetery, the calmer it gets; soon I can't hear the city anymore, only the sky lights my way. The place makes me nervous, but I keep calm, I know what I have to do. I've always had a soft spot for cemeteries, and it's not my first time working in one. I remember when I was at the Beaux-Arts in Rouen, some twenty years ago, I photographed my then-girlfriend in her underwear, laying in ambiguous poses over the tombstones. In terrible taste, but it undoubtedly would have pleased Professor Choron.

I reach the crime scene, the tomb is right in front of me, 330 x 200 x 100 cm. I've never made a mold of something this big. During my daytime scouting, it took me ages to find it. It's exactly as I imagined, neither too small nor too large, the ideal format for my project at Galería Alegría. A shape somewhere between a house, a castle, and a church, covered in lichen. For years I've wanted to create a mold of a tombstone to make an inflatable sculpture. My dream would be to mold several of them and create a huge structure, a sort of inflatable cemetery where kids could come jump and play. Bouncing on top of death, that would be great.

For now, I'll make do with this magnificent tomb I found, which will surely keep me busy. I start organizing my workspace and head toward the surrounding crypts where I hid all my heavy gear during the day, including about twenty liters of latex. I begin the first coat; it takes me five hours. Nothing to report overnight, not a single goth in sight, total calm. My only company is the wind, slamming doors, the caw of crows, and flies. Flies are always with me when I work with latex; they're drawn to the ammonia that keeps it liquid. In the cemetery, their buzzing takes on a new meaning; I think of the decomposing bodies that might not be that far away from me, and about matter transforming. Images from Dario Argento's Phenomena (1985) come to mind, where a girl with extrasensory powers communicates with insects; she follows a fly capable of detecting corpses from far away, which ultimately leads her to the killer's house. Argento's character, Kazanian, in 'Inferno' (1979), says: "The only real mystery is that our lives are ruled by the dead." Strangely, I think far less about the deceased around me than I would have imagined, probably because I'm too focused on my tomb, but I know it's partly thanks to them that I'm here in this mess. It would be nice to have a few flies for my show at Galería Alegría, and why not some food too, it's worth thinking about it.

Around 5:30 I finished. I have used 16 liters of latex. I'm worried, since I need at least four coats before demolding, which adds up to nearly 70 liters. How am I going to carry all that? No matter what, I can't back out now. The next afternoon, I'm back with 20 more liters of latex for the coming nights. I stash the container in one of my hiding places. The cemetery has somehow become my studio. And since I handle equipment there every day, more than once tourists have asked me for directions to the bathrooms or to some famous grave, thinking I'm one of the cemetery guards. I answer their questions and play along. I actually love being taken for a guard; it means I'm blending in with the setting. I sit on a step and watch people walk past my tomb, covered in its first coat of latex, shiny white and viscous. The curious stop, stare, and keep walking. I sit a while, observing this ballet between the viewers and my work in progress. I think about the atmosphere I want to create at Alegría and my current research on inflatable empty sculpture and their compression. If I use this process for the show, what exactly am I aiming for? Tourists keep passing past me, we look at each other out of the corners of our eyes, just like when I was on the boulevard bench. And why not create vacuum over humans? I think of my flies and my food, and link them to a story by Baudelaire I just read, the one evoking the time in ancient Egypt when no dinner was served without an object on the table reminding of death. That's where the idea comes from: inflate death and suck out life. "The opposite is reciprocal."

A few hours later I'm back in the same spot, completely alone. It's night. The session is a little less exhausting than the night before because I'm now used to the right posture for painting and tire less easily. My nighttime fear is the guards' car that passes at 2:30 by the immaculate latexed tomb; luckily, I hear it from afar and have time to hide my gear. Narrow escape.

The next 48 hours pass without incident, following the same routine. I'm in a kind of trance, not sleeping much, hyper-awake like some kind of living dead, all my time dictated by my comings and goings in the cemetery.

Friday night, the night of the demold, the most athletic moment, I had to cut the skin in several spots to pull it off. Everything went smoothly, by 4 am I was done. The skin of the tomb was lying at my feet; it was too heavy to carry it over the wall. I had to stash it in a nearby mausoleum and come back in the morning when the cemetery opened, hoping it would still be there. I chatted a bit with the little castle I had molded, I thanked it for what it gave me, and left.