Born in 1978 in Épernay (FR)
Lives and works in Paris (FR)
2010
Wood, 20 stainless steel balls
60 x 73 x 2 cm
Year of Purchase: 2014
Julien Discrit’s interest in geography, cartography, and geology, which constitute the main themes in his work, first compelled him to study geography, before enrolling in the École supérieure d’art et de design in Reims. Carte mémoire (Paris) and Carte mémoire (Los Angeles) are delicate constructions of strips of wood at the intersection of which the artist placed stainless steel balls which allow him to structure these personal maps.
Both constructions are freely based on the model of orientation charts of Micronesian navigators, and borrow the principles of navigation and wayfinding derived from the projection of the microcosm of the chart onto the macrocosm of the world. The steel balls symbolize points or places important to the artist, without any indication of fixed or predefined scale. Les Cartes mémoire follow an open-ended plan that the artist seems to build for his personal use.
A photograph entitled Carte mémoire 2008 shows the artist pausing for an instant on a hilltop overlooking Paris. Like an object that one would project in front of oneself or superpose over the landscape in order to modify it visually or adapt it to one’s own conception, Carte mémoire replaces the conventional city plan with personal, mobile geography. Indeed, without a plan, a map, or a panoramic table, the city is but an undecipherable labyrinth to a walker who has not yet invested its monuments and streets with meaning and memories. Sometimes armed with his guidebook, which he would have read in advance, this walker-turned-tourist might even begin to invest significant places, and the main roads leading to them, with studied memories.
Using Julien Discrit’s Cartes mémoire, the flâneur appropriates the city map in terms of his or her own mythology and landmarks. The grid connecting the steel balls is reminiscent of subjective transections of the city proposed by Guy Debord’s 1957 Psychogeographic Guide of Paris. Indeed, the map usually works thanks to a neurophysical and sentimental articulation activated mainly by memory. Space is not a given element but is always transmitted to the individual who learns to find his way within a particular cultural order. Julien Discrit, for his part, constructs his own mental map.
Magali Le Mens
First published in Guillaume Désanges and Hélène Guenin (eds.), Erre. Variations labyrinthiques, Metz, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2011, p. 145. © Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2011.