This series started as a journal of the Covid pandemic. First intended as a distillation of events and an examination of the body, it expanded further into a more diffuse thought about my position, distance to the world and current events. The abstraction of words clashes with the sensuality of drawn shapes, the repetition of a daily paper mirrors the repetition of the human being, the brutality of the news of the world reminds us how events beyond our control affect our beings. I began to draw paired organs, unique and vital to everyone. Though organs are the most real objects, concealed under the skin they feel fictious. How do my own kidneys look like? Their colour, their texture and particularities? Do they both function? I feel like a wooden chest that carries many curiosities.

The Silly Walks series is presented in the form of a grid, a predominant structure in the modernist period. Here the attention is not only focused on the spatial and temporal ambivalence of the grid, such as highlighted by Rosalind Krauss 1 , is solely on its centrifugal dynamic, revealed as fragments of the world, nor centripetal, repressing any interpretation other than its organization. The Silly Walks grids become three-dimensional and tangible, repeated, superimposed and deformed, they indicate the accident, the side step, the stuttering or on the contrary the excessive and pathetic intention but also the creation and the invention.

Leaving the plane, the geographical abscissa and ordinate, the timetable, the graph paper and the typography grid, here the crossed filaments project their shadow on the wall and become a parlour lattice, a gold digger's sieve or a curtain of pearls at the threshold of summer. They are filters between two states or two spaces. The thickness of their lines is inconstant. They are made of rope string and print. The rolled up Financial Times creates the rigidity of the lines, but the knotted threads articulate the grid in a flexible way, thus encouraging spatial deformation. The irregularity created by a frame (which favours it or tries to contain it) is the paradigm of this series.

To the regularity of the events described in the newspaper, to the repetition of its copies is opposed the gesture of the artist. The title is a direct reference to The Ministry of Silly Walks, by Monty Python, the demonstration of a typically idiotic and absurd move that begins in the morning by buying a newspaper.

Sophie Bouvier Ausländer