Video of the publication included on the exhibitions My Life Is Going To Change (2014).
Installation view from the exhibition My Life Is Going To Change (2014). Fondation Gulbenkian. Paris.
Installation view from the exhibition My Life Is Going To Change (2014). Fondation Gulbenkian. Paris.
Installation view from the exhibition My Life Is Going To Change (2014). House of Photography. Hamburg.
My Life Is Going to Change
Installation and publication (2014)
My Life Is Going to Change (2011-15) is an artistic project that has different shapes: (an installation, a workshop, a newspaper, and an artist book). It started in 2011 when I began collecting images and headlines from various European and North American newspapers with the aim of composing a visual archive that would reflect the media landscape arising from an historic moment marked by a series of large-scale demonstrations that shook the world, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring and the heightened economic and political crisis that has affected some European countries. The archive gradually became a dynamic object that inspired us, together with David-Alexandre Guéniot, to create several projects which, in taking various forms and directions, analyse and question the way that the contemporary media communicate information in images and words. One of those forms is an installation in which a wall is covered by sheets of newspaper whose images have been painted black, not as an act of censorship but as a response to the vortex of images that fatally defines the realm of the mass media. Through this gesture, the scene composed of newspapers becomes strangely vague, bordering on abstraction. As a counterpoint to the installation, we also produced a publication (that could be taken by the spectators) containing a series of images done together with a group of art students during a workshop that I organised. In this workshop, it was suggested that the students choose an image from the archive to be reconstructed in the studio. Through the imitation of gestures (largely of prominent public figures such as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, among others), the young students discover and reveal the dissembling and theatrical game that makes up the contemporary political imagery.