Jonathan Roy, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec Resident, speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR ahead of the Summer Open Studios 2025.
Presque rien (Almost nothing) is an exploration of minimal forms of art/architecture, at the boundary between practices; when sculpture becomes construction becomes landscape becomes place… Neither one nor the other, or perhaps all at once, on the verge of everything and nothing at all.
This research/creation project focuses on the encounter between art and architecture, especially minimal forms of art/architecture: those particular moments when the two intersect and overlap, when they meet most simply and intimately, when distinctions fade. Art? Architecture? Something else?
The project continues this incessant exploration of the “limit”, this superposition of realities, reflecting on forms of art/architecture which play on the tenuous boundary between one world and another, between object, space, place, sculpture, construction, landscape, the ordinary and the extraordinary; Works which tend towards the essence, Presque rien.
In Rome, field observations quickly oriented my work towards the creation of an art/architecture installation using a few ordinary materials:
A place in its simplest expression, an ephemeral and reversible intervention, an impermanent architecture, a presence in the landscape. Lines, surfaces, delimitations, materials.
I instantly felt the need to anchor the project in the Roman context, in the ancient and contemporary city, in the daily reality and history of the place, in a human perspective linking the past and the present.
Wandering through the archaeological sites, I was fascinated by the fields of architectural fragments: all these pieces of columns, capitals, friezes, left there on the ground, as if stored, as if waiting. I was also struck by the countless worksites all over Rome, especially the underground work digging into the city: construction of a new metro line, restoration of monuments, infrastructure and road works, and, of course, archaeological excavations.
During the research, I was captivated by a series of archival photographs showing archaeological excavation work at various Roman sites from the late 19th century to the 1930s: workers several meters below current ground level, surrounded by ladders, wheelbarrows, fragments of columns half-excavated from the ground, and earth everywhere. The project evokes part of this unique atmosphere of excavations, this (re)discovery of what lies “below”, hidden, unsuspected, under all these layers.
These archives are paralleled with photographs of homeless camps taken across the city, keeping track of several makeshift homes, barely a few square meters, often set up in alcoves and entrances. I was interested in the typology and stratification of these minimal, precarious architectures: cardboard on the ground, mattress and/or sleeping bag, pillow and blanket, sometimes a tent, and a few essential items like clothes and a bottle of water.
Construction sites, archaeological excavations and homeless camps all evoke transient, impermanent, changing states, with an imperfect, crude, dirty, noisy aspect, somewhere between order and disorder, in transformation. These ephemeral places and moments, which ultimately leave only traces, are reflected in the materiality and language of the installation.
The work takes shape from ordinary building materials, banal objects and elements that generally go unnoticed: orange ballast bags used on construction sites, orange PVC pipes for wastewater disposal, a few everyday items, water and earth.
Components create masses, surfaces and structures, reminiscent of archaeological fragments of marble or pottery, the paving and columns of Roman buildings, the mattress, pillow or tent of the homeless, the framework of the primitive hut, or the basic elements of all architecture.
Almost nothing: planes and lines, horizontality and verticality, a sculpture/construction, a ruin, an everyday space, a shelter, a home, a place outside of time; then nothing at all, the bags and pipes soon returning to their ordinary use.
Appear, disappear, reappear…
