Katia Porro is
an arts writer,
curator
and
translator.

There are a million ways to describe a landscape. One could start with the lines, the contours, the shadows, the light, the inhabitants, the intruders. But how do we describe one that is in the making? One that is composed of signs and targets that are always mutating, while confirming, imposing even, its infiniteness. A horizon, an endless grid, a symbol of freedom. Overwhelming, yet ambiguous.

“What we use in creating our environment is the least physical thing in the world, namely, words. Of course, that doesn’t at all mean that in postponing the physical realisation of this environment, we have avoided picturing it. On the contrary, we have refused to complete a single image, our own, preferring instead that as many should be created as there are people listening to this tale, who imagine this environment for themselves, quite beyond our control. Not a single utopia, then, but an infinity of utopias, as many as there are listeners.”

Anaérobie, in its ambiguity and multiplicity, also refuses a complete single image, as it has many. And it is as much made up by its codes and symbols as it is by the words that shape it. The lines, contours, inhabitants, intruders, are there, yet the words give them endless potential. Anaérobie is thus an improbable territory where fiction and reality contaminate and reinforce each other.

Anaérobie exists physically, but only temporarily in certain spaces before it packs itself up, evolves, and unfolds elsewhere, this time in a different form. And always with a different name.
47.014274, 3.146179, PATIO: Anaérobie slightly dresses up a space as a means of inviting its visitors to truly look at it, to inhabit it, to understand its origins, its functions, rather than traversing it inattentively. 47.004422, 3.158492: À LA LUEUR DES GUIDES: Anaérobie slightly dresses up a space as a means of inviting its visitors to forget the space momentarily, sending them elsewhere. It doesn’t embellish the skeleton of the existing space, it grows its own spine. Its inhabitants/intruders – called followers – multiply, feeding on the environment itself to exist. 45.786216, 3.094144: SURFACE MODULABLE: Anaérobie presents its capacity to shapeshift. 45.783329, 3.083330: À LA LUEUR DES GUIDES: Anaérobie nous confronte à l’inexistence de la notion de durée à travers une lueur invariable. And so on…

Anaérobie, as I experience and understand it, is the univers plastique composed by David Blasco. Each drawing, object, environment, video, text that the artist produces is both a composant and byproduct of Anaérobie as his artistic proposals are accompanied by a text, an ‘extrait of Anaérobie’, as the artist calls it. So when we speak of David Blasco’s visual universe there is not a cosmic and ambient insinuation behind the term: as a model-maker, the artist shapes the contours of the universe Anaérobie through each of his works.

There is something cinematographic about Anaérobie (the visual universe of David Blasco), as its manifestations often borrow forms not far from those seen on film sets. However, this aspect of the work/world at hand is perhaps less to be understood as theatrical as an incarnation of the dialectics of the inside and outside as he often breaks the fourth wall in his installations. David Blasco offers us several windows unto a fictional world that is anchored in the ‘real’ one from which we experience it. Visitors of Anaérobie desambulate through his works and installations almost as if they are weaving in and out of it. And although fiction plays an important role in the cinematographic experience of Anaérobie, it is nevertheless a speculative fiction: David Blasco uses the narrative to imagine futures, pasts and presents that are deeply rooted in reality, its spaces, its inhabitants, and its interactions.

In Anaérobie, interaction is fundamental, whether it be an interaction between hand and material, body and space, body and body. David Blasco privileges collaboration, parasitism even. At times, the artisanal and technical skills of others help shape Anaérobie, giving it different textures, colours, forms. They compliment the already rich lands of Anaérobie, shaped with precision and technique — such as marquetry, drawing, model making — accompanying it through its evolution. However, it is only slightly out of sync with our own transforming world. Because the interrogations posed in David Blasco’s work resonate strongly with burning issues of today's world: social organisation, the control of bodies in space, architectures in decline, the memories of space, and, most importantly, how to reconstruct and reimagine a universe.

“I have always thought that the future of the world will be wrapped in a shadow. Not reactionary, obscurantist or sad shadow, but shadow charged with electronic and sensorial information, full of vibrations, fragmenting the existing world and creating fresh, imaginary connections,” Andrea Branzi, a pioneer of speculative architecture, wrote.

Anaérobie is perhaps our world simply wrapped in a shadow, a lueur, full of vibrations that creates imaginary, yet necessary, connections.