THE RED CARPET OF THE SALON DE MONTROUGE

Montrouge (France), 2023

Continuing our deconstruction of the symbol of the Red Carpet and its association with the myth of Persephone, the evolving installation “The caress of the deciduous” at the 67th Salon de Montrouge unrolls a red carpe longitudinally at the Belfry. The red carpet is laid in the direction of the passage through the square. We install sculptures on the carpet progressively, to provoke routine and renew the viewer’s gaze on the installation. The sculptures are assemblages of deciduous objects donated by residents we met during our residency. We reinterpret them as offerings to Persephone, whose red fabric unites, caresses and revives these deciduous objects.

The piece “Between the fangs and the arm“ focuses, like many others before it, on the moment of the abduction of Persephone – red carpet – by Hades – steel plate. At first glance, it expresses a blatant duality between the roll of fabric enclosed behind the bars, the soft roundness of the silky fabric, and the sharp points of the rough sheet metal. But on closer inspection, the sheet metal curves upwards, bending under the thick fabric
sewn to it. Hades and Persephone form a single cycle. Here, objects donated by Montrouge residents are combined, moving from private salons to the Salon de Montrouge.

In the photo above, “Persephone, the red carpet” (the same 40 m roll of fabric from the Eleusis project on display between the bars) has been freed from the exhibition space’s “world of the dead”.

It is brought back to life in the public space (“world of the living”) with the re-enactment of the performance “Fertility of Persephone, the red carpet” (Eleusis, June 17, 2023) by artists and local residents. The route starts at the Colucci social and cultural center, where we are exhibiting two extracts from the film shot at Eleusis and the preparatory/restitution work for the “The caress of the deciduous” installation, and joins the Belfry. In this way, it joins social and contemporary art, the “bottom” and the “top” of Montrouge, both geographically and socio-economically.