“Distract certain architectural elements from the greater whole.
Render them their intrinsic property through a process of separation from the material.
Utilize their quality as a semi-permeable divider.
Portals, architectural ornaments, moucharabiehs, shutters, carry a poetic and aesthetic charge.
This dialectic between the object, the individual and the territory should be studied, constructed and deconstructed.”
(Lucie Laflorentie)

The exhibition Faire inversion is the result of a period of experimentation and plastic research around cement and marble powder, which Lucie Laflorentie carried out in 2019 and 2021 between Khemisset and in residency at Le Cube à Rabat.

Lucie Laflorentie‘s work with matter and colour questions the displacement of the working gesture, of the landscape, but also of the motifs that constitute them. Whether they are organic or architectural, linked to a territory, to human activity, to thought, to history or to the imagination.

The paths opened up during her two residencies at Le Cube and in a workshop specializing in cement tiles in Khemisset allow her to experiment with larger formats and new motifs, pieces that remain in correlation with her past work – around subjects such as the landscape, the working and agricultural environment, and the relationship to craft knowledge.

“It is a second phase of research in Morocco that is opening up for me today. The project consists of returning to the production workshop in Khémisset to learn new techniques by collecting materials and tools.

The aim is to give the chance to create new works for the exhibition Faire inversion at Le Cube -independent art room. All this in the assiduity of my investigations around sculpture, installation and representation, through the assembling of cement, marble powder and pigments.

For this research session, which I call From the territory to the deployment of matter, I wish to develop experimentations based on the grids of gates, moucharabieh, an architectural ornament very present in Morocco. These same ironworks often materialize a kind of border between the private, intimate space and the public space. Because of their structure, they are often openwork and allow the eye to pass through them. This gives a framed and phantasmagorical image of the “other side” and thus creates new fragmented forms.

 Cut out with a disc machine and used as color dividers, the sculptural project becomes pictorial. Like an ambiguous language between body, tools and territory.

This search for forms, through a workshop mechanic, a displacement of gesture and a work of the local material, connected to the “terrain” materializes the drawing and the setting in color of these intimate, fragmented and territorialized spaces.

By following the wandering movement of the paths of a city and, by extension, of its occupants, the resonance and transposition to the studio is clear: the principle being that everything should be together, and that everything should be well linked.”
(Lucie Laflorentie, Rabat, 2021)

“Places belong to another logic than that of the map; singular, calling upon time and memory, each with its own individuality, enveloped by bodies that are also bodies of memory and language, they are difficult to describe geographically. Their “depth”, which keeps them attached to a culture rather than a nature, propels them to the side of iconic representation, as it strives to produce a resembling sign.”
(Anne Cauquelin , from Le site et le paysage, chapter Logique de l’extension: le lieu. 2012)

The exhibition has been supported by the Institut Français du Maroc.

Documentation
Leaflet of the exhibition