I had the chance to install it in the vitrine of the tiny airport at les îles-de-la-Madeleine, right in front of the security desk. I’ve always loved the odd, tense, banal non-space of airports. I would love to have an opportunity to do something in those spaces again one day. It was also amazing to see the islands, and to get to meet the people that worked at le centre d’artistes AdMare, mostly as volunteers.

I was raised by chemists. In my mother’s loving cosmology, reality was something quantifiable and elegant, only briefly laid bare within chemical reactions. On the other hand, I never met my paternal grandfather, but heard about his half-copied, half-invented machines. In an age when service departments would’ve been on a different continent, he re-built assembly lines and industrial equipment on the fly. After his death, Cacharro, our old dog, slept in the last bell-shaped husk of a forgotten machine that had manufactured buttons, and the chickens roosted in the remnants of his underground workshop in the lush back garden of Llo-Lleo, until one day it collapsed after an earthquake.

2.

This project began when I stumbled upon Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools². I was still thinking of the galleries unfurling behind me: the rise of a different kind of collective community marked (artificially?) by the transition between galleries full of bleeding Jesuses and beheaded saints to massive oils of picnickers grinning at their children and eating herring; nordic festivals of plenty rife with symbols beyond me to decipher.

I’d spent hours as a teenager absorbed by Hieronymus Bosch, but this one had always been my favourite. It seemed simpler, smaller than the epic Garden of Delights. The sullen, fatuous, energy that played across the surface of the painting seemed both a subtler, and more mysteriously charged expression of folly than his more fantastical creations. I’d never seen the real thing before. I still felt an affinity with this supposedly dead image.

The fool is one of those universal archetypes along the unstable spectrum of good and evil. Appropriation being a contemporary manifestation of an older, devious, sometimes brutal transfer of cultural information. The virgin, as the defender of purity, perfection and orthodoxy would seem about as far from the figure of the fool as you could get. But in South America, the virgin, like the Candomble god Exu³, combines characteristics of order and disorder, chaos and perfection. Like the trickster, she has the power of a shifting dual nature. In many Northern Chilean churches, statues of the virgin conceal older goddesses. Her devil dancers of the Diabladas⁴ are rooted in older myths of deities like Tiw and Anchoncho, protectors of the ancient silver mines of the Bolivian altiplano.

In Catholic traditions the fool as denier of god transforms into the wise fool who satirizes and deflates the powerful to expose corruption, as in Chaucer’s tale of The Summoner and the trial of farts.⁵

The fool is not just a contradiction of disturbing energies held in tension – cunning, naïveté, ruthlessness, conceit, duplicitousness, honesty (in the way those with nothing to lose are honest) – to me the fool is also present in instability and absurdity, in unpredictable feedback loops, and unexpected blowback.

If you look over my projects you will notice no Art Historical leitmotifs – no ships, no fools. But they are always there…