Full name: Yves Mettler
Currently lives and works in: Berlin, Germany
Practice: Urban intervention, European Narratives
Areas of interest: Urbanity, comics, fluids, Europe
Why are you a part of MagiC Carpets: Because Europe is a loom full of stories, all being holes and knots in a wounded fabric drifting in a fragmented universe
What inspires you as an artist? The things people do to accommodate their reality, the rifts that happen in-between
What do you think is the purpose of art? To bring joy and reflect inequality
Your favourite book(s): Paysages après la bataille, Juan Goytisolo
Your favourite film(s): High plains drifter
MagiC Carpets project: FLIGHT
The comics about the place, the neighbourhood and the relations the kids have with it, as well as about bringing it back to the academia, as a reminder of the whole we’re always part of.
Other projects
Bancbigny
Type: Urban intervention
Brief description: Building benches out of stamped earth with the inhabitants of a depleted suburbs, where I went, since there was a ”Europe Square”
Europe Square (From With Love)
Type: Photography, postcards, text
Brief description: Composition building on my archive of photographs and postcards of squares around Europe, in which I integrated the inception of the errant mayor.
Secret at the Periphery
Type: In-situ intervention
Brief description: There is a handwritten story on the handrail of the hydroelectric dam built in 1959 by the city of Zurich. The story the length of which is 760m or 5000 words, tells about two mayors who decided to go on a hike to find the edge of the city. Following the trail of energy resource, they ended up at the source of the energy, the dam. The story gets a twist as one of the mayors falls into the lake by night and reappears the next morning.
Unfrastructures
Type: Outdoor sculpture
Brief description: Seven objects of stamped earth, a crude earth concrete technique, are built on the riverbed of an alpine river, imitating concrete infrastructures used to slow down the stream and therefore act on the river’s behaviour. The nature of the objects is voluntarily inadequate: while it resists differently than concrete on a sudden rise, it dissolves also and turns back into earth. The time of the sculptures is the time of the show.
Contact information
Email: [email protected]