Displacement is at the core of my artistic research. Every project is a personal space-time experience, a process in which I identify limits that are actual territories: contact zones.
Architect by training, Edouard Decam lives and works between the Pyrenees mountains and Barcelona.
Edouard Decam has exhibited at le 104 and Espace Electra Paris, Farenheit – Flax Foundation Los Angeles, Matadero Madrid, Hangar Lisboa, French Institute Madrid and Barcelona, was resident in Casa de Velazquez and Matadero, among others. He recently won the LOOP Discover award with his film Volva.
His artistic practice focuses on the relationship that is woven between space and time, through the perspective of art and science. He works on architecture, often in extreme environments, considering it as a mirror of the landscape. He observes and interprets the influence and the links that architecture establishes with its surroundings, in a process of identification of the limits that separate and unite these elements. These limits, suspended in an indeterminate space-time, constitute contact zones, real territories to explore.
The direct confrontation: the journey, the desperation, the slowness, the cold, the goal, is the true « script » of his work. Moving images, long-exposure photographs, sound, found or self- produced elements nourish the installations in which he formalizes this discourse.
Volva
16mm film transferred to HD / 24:39 min / 2016
‘Volva’ is the name the German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler gave to the earth when seen from the outer space in his text « Somnium », considered to be the first sci-fi book.
Astronomical observatories study a remote past, suspended in an indefinite time, without paying attention to its surroundings. Focused on the astronomical observatory of the “Pic du Midi” (a peak at the French Pyrenees) – technological architecture preserved of any noise or light pollution – this 16mm film reflects on the space-time relationship established between architecture, science and landscape.
In a solar chronology, the machines try to capture the surrounding environment as well as a series of waves that seem to be transmitted through the mountains and landscape in the distance. The absence of human form, the succession of mechanical movements, the direction of telescopes' gaze suggests a place artificially controlled, robotic. Views of both interior and exterior spaces confront the scene to a parallel and expanded space/time where it appears to be coming from. This is a new territory arising in between the architecture of the Peak and the surrounding landscape. The film is assembled around the possible movement of this space that would shift in different temporalities – past-present-future – and spaces at once. Captions on site and radio broadcasts of unknown provenance compose the film’s soundscape. By combining representations of reality, this experimental work explores the construction of the contemporary landscape and the role of the image in it.