Sara Favriau reinterprets the traditional status of the artwork, often seen as sacred and fixed, by reimagining it as a living organism, altered and shaped by various forces over time. Her project-works—whether sculptures, installations, or performances—are imbued with a keen sensitivity to environmental and societal issues. By combining popular materials and craftsmanship, Sara Favriau establishes a dialogue between mediums, creates cross-overs between temporalities and territories, and deconstructs the notion of an immutable work. Her hybrid, experimental process, where the work is continuously re-enacted and documented through films, performances, and narratives, dissolves any form of permanence into a state of continuous emergence.
 

     Initiated in Saudi Arabia and continued in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Marseille, and Paris-Bobigny, the Petits riens series consists of collecting small-sized materials that contribute to representing a given territory. These gathered elements are then assembled by the sculptor into about thirty distinct pieces. Sara Favriau’s method is intentionally simple and modest. The gesture is minimal: the «petit rien» (small nothing) results from an «action-peu» (small action) [1]. Peripheral to her site-specific sculptural work, the artist uses nothing more than a cart filled with tools attached to her bicycle to collect natural elements, found objects, or remnants of human activity across various territories. She accumulates fragments the local daily life without seeking rare or spectacular items. Instead, these elements are nearly invisible or insignificant in their banality, while contributing to a poetics of the ordinary and a micro-cartography of the territories she traverses. Each place symbolically fits in a ‘‘pocket handkerchief’’, as the artist puts it.

     The objects, through their form or the reading of their materials, remain closely tied to the place from which they originate and never fully emancipate themselves from it. Each material’s origin is thus legible within the artwork. By returning sculpture to its own essence, Sara Favriau maintains a tautological relationship to creation: ‘‘a rose is a rose is a rose’’ [2], where simply saying the name evokes the thing itself. In addition to describing the series protocol, each label of the Petits riens precisely lists the materials composing the work, which remain identifiable in their original state (e.g., ‘‘provençal cane, Aleppo pine, juniper seeds, oak acorns, pine needles, cartridge, car headlight debris...’’). This methodical listing recalls scientific or ethnographic inventories but takes on another dimension here: it gives a quasi-encyclopedic significance to fragments that would otherwise lack institutional existence. Simultaneously, the artist proposes a rewriting of these same materials, whose linear arrangement and display at a height of 1.30 meters evoke the logic of a library or a visual grammar. In this way, the setup also reveals a desire to transmit knowledge that transcends any practical purpose. Thus, the series becomes part of a living memory approach, where the migration of collected elements is seen as a metamorphosis rather than a disappearance. Each sculpture allows for the scrutiny of present traces within a perpetual cycle of renewal and forgetting.

     Using the same approach as for her anti-cabane—which does not serve as a shelter [3]—Sara Favriau proposes here the anti-paddle, which loses its function to become an object of contemplation. Inspired by the Polynesian ceremonial dance paddles, ‘‘hoe’’, intended to symbolically steer a canoe, the artist has repurposed the paddle-sculpture from its original navigational function. This intervention combines various wood essences and involves transforming the mass-produced paddle through a series of actions. Essentially, it consists of cutting, carving, stapling, and weakening a form that gains in materiality what it loses in utility.

     The non-functional role of these objects and their spatial arrangement can be likened to the figure of the ‘‘homme de rangement’’ (arranging man) as described by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects (1968) [4]. According to Baudrillard, the ‘‘arranging man’’ is not merely a user or owner of the objects around him; he orchestrates their presence and configures their meanings in space: ‘‘He arranges space as a distribution structure; through the control of that space, he holds all the possibilities for reciprocal relationships, and thus the totality of roles that objects can assume.’’ In this system, however, objects are far from passive entities, as they reflect and contain a worldview beyond their immediate materiality. For Baudrillard, even more so, humans are as connected to these objects as they are to their own organs. It is through them that they can expand the realm of possibilities: ‘‘It is neither possession nor enjoyment that matters to them, but responsibility, in the true sense of maintaining the permanent possibility of ‘responses’.” Thus, simple objects, arranged according to a certain poetics, can aspire to the monumental.
 

Elora Weill-Engerer 
Art Historian, art writer and curator

[1] ‘‘Actions-peu’’ is also the title of a series by Boris Archour, which follows anonymous and ephemeral interventions in public space between 1993 and 1997.

[2] ‘‘Rose is a rose is a rose’’, Gertrude Stein, ‘‘Sacred Emily’’ (1913), Geography and Plays, 1922. One might also think of Joseph Kosuth’s work One and Three Chairs (1965).

[3] la redite en somme ne s’amuse pas de sa répétition singulière, Palais de Tokyo, 2016.

[4] Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, Paris : Gallimard, 1968, p.37-41.