ABOUT THE EPHEMERAL AND ARTIFICIAL NATURE OF EVERY BORDER
Through a simple gesture in the landscape – appropriating 100 sqm, drawing a border and inhabiting it for a day – the artist creates a series of absurd micro-nations that invite us to reflect on the nature of every frontier and the very concept of nation.
These actions result in “ephemeral micro-states““, such as a circle of plaster on fallow land, a triangle delimited by wooden slats that float on a huge reservoir inhabited with the help of a life raft, a square in a parking lot delimited with traffic cones, etc … Republics whose boundaries always reflect an artificial criterion of geometry, which never last for more than 24 hours and whose only inhabitant is the artist himself.
These are ridiculous and absurd states, whose documentation in the form of aerial photographs becomes a set of works as simple in their aesthetic as they are deep in their meaning. Poetic and visually effective gestures whose simplicity and irony hide a serious reflection that is very necessary today.
The Minimal Republics project also includes a short documentary (5min) https://vimeo.com/237301549
This series belongs to STUPID BORDERS, a set of conceptual projects that questions the idea of a „nation” and points at the strange feeling of possession that man exerts towards the Earth, an entity which transcends us in age.