The Weight in the Hand

Guillaume Leblon is replying to the invitation made to him by the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard to occupy the Panorama de la Friche la Belle de Mai, in Marseille, with an installation which he has devised specifically for the venue and the occasion.

Le poids que la main supporte, a work created in situ, is the result of a process of collection throughout Marseille set up ahead of the exhibition. This involved flushing out things thrown away and discarded,  things abandoned, and things dumped, all scattered on the city’s edges and in its wasteland plots, and selected for their narrative potential and their formal or functional typology. Made up of exclusively metal elements, the installation thus puts back together a resonant space, and one made practicable based on rudimentary things like a signboard, a  couscous steamer, a barge, a garage door, an air-conditioning radiator, and a staircase.

As unusable wrecks, removed from the circuit of consumable and utilitarian items, these functionless things become abstract signs of a transitory state, somewhere between culture and nature. “Things abandoned are the result of an activity being abandoned. They evolve naturally towards a secondary landscape”*– which the French landscape designer Gilles Clément calls a “Third Landscape”. In a Manifesto published in 2004, he wrote: “The Third Landscape—undecided fragment of the Planetary garden– describes the sum of the spaces where man abandons the evolution of the landscape just to nature alone.”*

Prior to the collection, the elements forming Le poids que la main supporte thus drew blind spots in the city, unproductive and sacred spaces where they continued to whisper a collective memory and consciousness, heaped in rubble or at the mercy of the wind. From these underground forms of the social flux, Guillaume Leblon has kept just their outlines, their volumes, their surfaces. After having designated and removed them, he has assembled them using an operation involving flattening and assembly. From volume to surface, these eclectic items put end to end become so many parcels in a fragmented landscape which the visitor can grasp and trample underfoot.

This issue of the “geology of memory” continually permeates the work of Guillaume Leblon, who prefers to (re-)occupy empty spaces which are seemingly without qualities, rather than formulate, from scratch, iconographic symbols encouraging the exercise of collective memory. He is content to sculpt what is already-there and what is latent by minimal interventions and gestures of addition and subtraction, which here permit a tipping of scale (from gleaning on the scale of a city to the clearly delimited floor of  an exhibition venue) and a tipping of  sensitive perception (from outside to inside, object to plane) and transforms the memory into experience. “In all circumstances, the Third Landscape can be looked at as the part of our living space given over to the unconscious. Depths where events  are stored and displayed in an apparently undecided way.”* With Le poids que la main supporte, it is the memory of Marseille-made-landscape that you, visitors, are passing through.

Alexandra Delage, April 2015