Drifting Paris

Credits

• Artist: Cédric Alviani (Von Taipei)

• Curator: Chia-Han Chou

• Medium: Photography (Raw Snapshots)

• Format: 15 panels (120cm x 90cm)

• Venues: Yunghe Arts Foundation (New Taipei), Alliance Française (Kaohsiung), Fayaque Xinyi (Taipei)

A new tide of clandestine posters sweeps every day across the walls that frame the Parisian boulevards. Quickly outdated and quickly replaced, these colorful placards compete in a cacophony of exuberant slogans, singing virtues of the latest electronic gadgets, fashion brands and theatrical shows. Day after day, their voices and faces are superimposed with a thick layer of paper and glue, which swells and shrinks under the relentless pasting-ups and tearing-downs.

Washed out, soggy, warped by the sun and rain, torn and smeared by vandals, the pictures have become distorted as if seen through a prism of moving water. The fading of the yellows and magentas, mixed with traces of glue, form a foam and blue tint that deepens the impression of the marine landscape.

The degradation does not spare the characters whose lives are bound inside the images. Their elegance and sensuality, their joy for life, has given way to the bitterness and rage of the oppressed, to the despair of a drowning man. In this ocean of paper and glue, bodies and faces gasp for air, their drifting souls cry out to passers-by begging for help.

Uptown in the “City of Lights”, where the scent of urine often masks even the most poignant of chic perfumes, these incongruent scraps of consumerist society have taken on an element of subversion. The resilience of these paper ghosts create an echo of the innumerable homeless who, just as invisible but very much alive, line the walls of the Parisian boulevards.