UPCYCLING WAYS & PRACTICES

~ statement

I recently met the word 'upcycling' through a relevant socio-æsthetic investigation lead by Ariel Wizman and Laurent Lunetta in Révolte dans la Mode (2018), a documentary set in the contemporary fashion design worlds and industry. Unwilling to promote anything as a permanent truth, the concept merely spoke to me since then I got to better sense the essential non-contingency of the well-known Correspondance des Arts. The insight was utterly trivial (we know that large scaled technic categories such as accumulation, dissipation, multiplication, contamination, disruption, geometrisation, etc... are readily transferable, and even more since you get to the three basic morphologic operations that are addition/substraction, displacement and substitution) but it was actually a lot of converging considerations at a time to just bypass the issued triviality. What I got to understand might sound even triter since I hereby condense it into a few circonstancial wordy lines, but there it is, I endorse it. The Correspondance des Arts is something far beyond pure artistic accointances, reverences, influences, schools and families, let's say a bit too pejoratively, all kinds of arty consanguineous filiations. It doesn't have to do neither with the operativeness of the transfer of the mentioned technics above. The Correspondance des Arts has to do with the essential permeability of we makers with the time and space we are living in, with the singular mix of adopted and rejected trends we are living through and, fundamentally, the inflexible social, economic, geologic and cosmologic truths our singular lives are penetrated by. Thus, as extended as our here and now sensitiveness might be, if we consider the possibility of a not here and not now comprehension, the position understated here (and now and somewhen! for you reader) is clearly that history is made out of chapters, made out of closures. Hopefully, historical chapters do rarely open and close for everyone in strict homorhythmical cadences. And this is very wishful because I can't help thinking that both historical and social homorhythmics would be nothing but the sounds of sirens and dances of military boots. Furthermore, this impossible absolute synchronisation causes fortunate imaginary faults like the one I am being exploring to tell you about my inclination towards the upcycling ways and practices, meanwhile others could use the same fault, i.e their own spare time, to do some fitness, mow the lawn, go for a swim or extend their use of extended technics in the last opus they are being busy with. And that is fair enough since the one who has to feel the significance of his practice in terms of might to whether open, continue or close any chapters is not too wrong. Thus if we, i.e not only I but many other fellows practicing there and now, are not too wrong, we can affirm that the latter musical chapters dedicated to the creation and extension of new substantial sonic materials might have come to an end. Our time is no longer the one of the seek of new alphabets but rather the one of the utterly shifted grammars and combinated syntaxes. It is the time of the sauciest conceptual inversions through the most unexpected transgressive materic arrangements. If the last chapters of the XXe century already initiated the collapse of traditionally inherited enclosures and supplies for the raw materials (including the systemics of knowledge transmission) it has since continued to spread all over and for everyone at least digitally equipped. Matter being all readily profusely everywhere, our time is for the crafty upcyclers.

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Marseille, March 2019