LAUSANNE.- François Daireaux’s Blow Firozabad Bangles exhibition is the result of the artist’s many comings and goings between the glassmaking cities of Firozabad in India and Meisenthal in Moselle (France). Firozabad is a working-class city in the north of India whose main activity for several centuries has revolved around manufacturing glass and more specifically glass bracelets, or bangles, worn by Indian women. These bangles are manufactured daily by the millions in the hundreds of glassworks spread throughout the city. Virtually all of the city’s 600,000 residents work in the glass industry with infernal production rates and in conditions that are often extremely harsh.

For two years running, the artist visited the glassmaking city of Firozabad, taking pictures, filming and carrying out the inventory of an entire production which he then relocated by exporting it to the International Centre for Glass Art (CIAV) in Meisenthal. A collection of 404 toras – clusters of entwined bangles – was then blown in moulds kept intact by the CIAV after the successive closure of many Lorraine glassworks, leading to the Blow Bangles installation, featuring 404 glass ‘imprints’ mouth-blown by Meisenthal’s glassblowers. At the mudac the ‘imprints’ are all arranged on a stand around which visitors can walk before entering a dark room where the film Firozabad is screened.

The project touches on broad issues that are more topical than ever, i.e. the globalisation of mass production, working conditions to produce objects sold at low prices in the West, and the flow of goods and, through them, of cultures. By moving, transforming and recreating objects, François Daireaux fosters new exchanges with different modalities. He brings together distant cultures that share a glass manufacturing tradition and that are both facing local production crises, i.e. the closure of French factories due to relocation and the inhumane working conditions of mass glass manufacturing in India. The ‘imprints’ resulting from the fusion of their respective techniques invite the public to reflect on our globalised lifestyles, while the film brings us face-to-face with the stark reality of Firozabad.

Journeying into the unknown, such is the choice of artist François Daireaux who is ceaselessly gauging the world’s heartbeat, blood pressure and pulse; its rhythm, arrhythmia and pauses; its silences and commotions. On the lookout for potential contact points, on a quest for sounds, moving and still pictures that are committed to memory thanks to his recording devices (digital and film camera and sound recorder), François Daireaux goes in search of unique places in the world and his footsteps regularly take him where people live and work. Away from tourist destinations and any form of exoticism, he has been travelling alone to countries he does not know for the last 25 years, to draw his own experiences.

Thus he creates a vocabulary for his own work, which may be viewed as an extension of sculpture, including the way in which he constructs photographic images and films. He works as a gleaner of shapes, situations and images, exercising his gaze in a tenacious and solitary way. He burrows for and sculpts layers of reality, obsessed by actions and the subsequent transformations they trigger in physical matter as well as the social sphere. In the last few years, the artist’s photographic and film work has intensified to assert a visual work whose outlines and commitments are now understood, as much in terms of questioning the alienation of bodies as in a sensitive approach of the urban entropy of emerging countries.