RISK AREAS exhibition catalog

"Every time I went to one of these places, I collected things related to the drama that had happened there. I collected materials such as earth, wood, stone, root, ash, etc... which I kept in little glass jars. They were, for me, eloquent. First of all, because they were tangible elements from these tragedies that I had connected with. Elements that would eventually disappear over time, and also because these materials were proof that I had been there, the result of a certain personal journey [...]. "

"Eventually, I would use them as the main materials for the sculptures and photographs project that developed alongside my literary project. The visual artwork was conceived by reflection upon the pivotal character of my novel, Mat. In the fiction novel, he had just acquired a somewhat unfavorable gift in the form of a well-paid job where the function of the position petrified him: having to go to draft expert reports of dramatic scenes related to natural disasters for FEMA. The aforementioned disasters being actual and true as the basis for a fictional account. Mat was literally paralyzed, unable to move and perform this task; avoiding it by opting for an outlandish alternative: faking expert reports by documenting unauthentic accounts of the events and creating bogus images. To do this, he began to make small wooden boxes in which he organized scenes of devastation in miniature form with the little information that the FEMA management had given him. Names of places, people, and testimonials from early newspaper articles. From these boxes he photographed the scenes in macro form and invented the stories to go along with them, all formulated the exact same way in which actual expert FEMA reports were made[...]. "

"It came to me as a revelation that I had to make these boxes. In reality. That I should design and build them just as the character Mat had done. But in my own case, using the materials harvested from these non-fiction disaster scenes. I would put myself in the shoes of my fictional character and design these boxes as he did, and from there I would create the photographs as he did he for his expert reports. I would plunge my arm into the troubled waters of my fiction to extract these shadow boxes and bring them to the surface of reality, I would slide them silently along the dark waterline between these two worlds [...]. "

Olivier Bodart

Risk Areas, Art book (complete project), limited edition, 135p