Metasbilad

In the installation Metasbilad, 2015 created for the exhibition My Buenos Aires at La Maison Rouge, the spectators actively participate and experience the artwork. Their bodies are in an unstable position allowing them to envision a new sensitive approach to their own corporeality. Lamothe invites us to climb alone on a walkway that juts out into the next room below. The boards of wood sag under our feet as we, spectators, become actors; but let’s proceed with caution. -Vertigo when arriving at the end of the pontoon as the boards have sagged under my weight, I find myself in an uncomfortable situation, then I feel the weight of my body, its gravity and become aware of the latter. My body is no longer here “matter translucent of consciousness ” of which Sartre speaks, he reminds me of awareness of his presence and becomes again “this body that I do not cease the own experience of my corporeality that I can consider my being-at- world. I discover myself as incorporated, therefore I am-; Lamothe forces us to become aware of the Cogito.

This work has a strong impact on my corporeality as to make the experience that I am an embodied consciousness, and it can also refer to an important notion for phenomenology and in particular for Sartre: anguish. In fact, the vertigo provoked while walking through the sculpture, reminds us of that evoked by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, “Vertigo is anxiety insofar as I fear no to fall into the precipice, but to throw myself into it”.

By venturing on Lamothe’s work, I know very well that I would not fall, and that if the institution where the sculpture has been installed lets me venture there, it is that there is no danger. Yet I dread the way in which my body will react, a few meters above the void, I am “afraid of having fear”. It’s because I don’t know how I’m going to behave thereafter that I anguish. “Decisive leadership will emanate from a self that I am not yet “, and it is to the extent that I depend on this future self from which I do not know what actions could emanate when anxiety starts to grab me.

Text excerpt by Mathilde Ayoub

Metasbilad | 2015

Exhibition View: La Maison Rouge | Paris | France
Photograph: Marc Domage