Florence Doléac

Ballooon

April 2009

Installation of an Haïku reading lounge in the Issey Miyake shop of Paris

Materials: fishing nets, inflatable balls, hidden

Variable dimensions

“ Ballooon ” is an inflatable living room calling for a brief moment when haiku are read against a suggestive acoustic background. Fishing nets hold different sized multi-coloured balls on a carpet. Everyone is invited to come and seek an ideal position of relaxation in these reliefs. The whole thing conjures up a surprising landscape, made up of bodies that are absorbed and immobilized in positions of people reading.

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.