The Abduction, 2008 by Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni

“After Doom’s day, there will be only two things left on this planet: cockroaches and bronze sculptures.”

C. P., Art Dealer, Santa Fe

The Abduction is an ephemeral bronze sculpture. This project is specifically devised for Santa Fe, celebrated for its many art galleries and in particular for its tradition of bronze sculptures. Moreover, New Mexico has been regarded as the cradle of UFO-ology ever since the famous extraterrestrial crash in Roswell in 1947. Up to the present day, a large number of stories of “abductions” by extraterrestrials have been recorded. Our sculpture project sets out to bring together, within the Santa Fe museum of contemporary art, Western Americana and UFO-ology. In both cases, we are dealing with universally shared representations, which have their origins in New Mexico.

For the artists, one of the curatorial guidelines for this Biennial is to produce an ephemeral work. Our proposal, responding to this request in a paradoxical way, involves producing an ephemeral bronze  something like a subliminal bronze image. Starting from a sculpture donated by a local Santa Fe gallery representing three Navajo Indians hurtling down a precipice on a horse (titled Navajo Rollercoaster), our sculpture project can be broken down into three successive phases: 1. After a mold has been taken of the original Navajo Rollercoaster sculpture, it is melted down to recover the bronze. 2. The recovered bronze is used to produce an edition of The Abduction, a sculpture representing an extraterrestrial abduction on the original scene (three Navajo Indians on a horse hurtling down a cliff). That sculpture will be presented at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, accompanied by a photographic print of the original sculpture. 3. At the end of the Biennial, The Abduction sculpture will be melted down, then recast in its original Navajo Rollercoaster form. Because of the repeated melting-down operations, part of the material disappears. That loss will be embodied in the disappearance of one of the protagonists from the original scene, undeniably an indication of “abduction.” That sculpture will in turn be presented in the context of an exhibition, accompanied by a photograph of the ephemeral bronze of The Abduction.

We are dealing with a processed bronze sculpture, for at the same time as depicting an extraterrestrial phenomenon, the bronze sculpture experiences an abduction in its very material. For a brief moment, like a subliminal image, the sculpture changes shape, before returning to its initial appearance, slightly impaired. Abduction is a complex concept in America, covering a whole range of actions perpetrated by extraterrestrials on humans: kidnappings, scientific experiments, rapes But how can an abduction scene be represented via a sculptural object if it exists only in the collective unconscious? A set of traumatisms and repressed impulses are at work through the phantasm of extraterrestrial abduction and generic accounts of it. Believing in extraterrestrials above all means believing in the potency of a society’s myths, when a nation unanimously begins to see the same type of threatening shapes invading the sky. It is not a question of believing in the arrival of extraterrestrials on earth, but believing in their “landing in” a collective unconscious  the only space within which a meeting between a Navajo and an Alien seems, for a brief moment, to be perfectly logical and reasonable.

Giraud and Siboni’s work is located in Gallery 5.

Since 2007, Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni have collaborated on several art projects while simultaneously developing their own practices. The two share an interest in community experiences, bad taste, and various forms of subculture.

Fabien Giraud gained notoriety in 2006 with his installation Sans Titre (Rodage) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France. The work, which presents an impressively strange vision of a community of the future, consists of three computer-controlled minibikes whose motor speeds, and therefore sounds, are controlled by a computer learning program. Situated within the gallery on a platform, the minibikes, at random intervals, would roar and rev up. By means of a computer learning program, each bike could listen to the other and react by offering an ever more deafening sound, until finally the bikes go into unison and produce a “burn” (when the back wheel rubs against the tarmac). The cycle finishes with the roaring of the engines and smoke from the tires, then the program goes back to the beginning. Part sculpture, performance, and experiment in socialization, Giraud puts a new twist on the phenomonena of anthropomorphy

Giraud also organized a concert of hardcore punk music and endeavored to choreograph the crowd. For nine hours, he attempted to organize the movement into the chaotic appearance of pogo sticks by playing upon the various parameters which govern a punk concert. Entitled The Straight Edge (2007), the video is a sculptural experiment in which the crowd and its intensity provide the material.

As for Raphael Siboni, he recently directed the film Kant’s Tuning Club (2006), in which an avatar of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze rubs shoulders with “car-tuning” enthusiasts. In it we see a hypnotic cult scene of a head-on crash between two tuned cars from which Deleuze emerges, half laughing, half-dazed, with inordinately long fingernails. The film intelligently questions the notion of the super-hero of today. It has long been known particularly since Umberto Eco confirmed the end of the Superman model, the fabulous hero arriving from the planet Krypton, endowed with mind-boggling powers  that there are no longer any super-heroes. “No more super-heroes? Really?” Siboni wonders, adding, “In fact there is only one left, Batman. He doesn’t have any super powers, but he does have super purchasing power!” The possibility of obtaining (or indeed producing) the ultimate gadget- one that will change the face of the world- can make tuning fans throughout the world dream.

Mixing airsoft, tuning, punk, hardcore, and Guinness Book of World Records, the work of Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni lies at the boundary between art, pop culture, and entertainment. Linking vernacular with mass consumption and folk with pop, their practice tends to produce complex, often spectacular objects and events that question the possibility of contemporary subjectivity. Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni hybredize and give new parameters to practices that have emerged from Pop subculture.

Marc-Olivier Wahler