Les jardins de l'Engrenage
Robert Milin, sound work, 2022
There was the lockdown and trips were banned if far from home. All that remained was to discover by walking the areas around home outside the usual routes. That’s how Robert Milin discovered The Gardens of Engrenages and all these people fighting to preserve life in the city.
He started to come regularly for a collective planting, cleaning up, collective watering, a meeting, a sale of vegetables, a meal, a discussion.
With his mike he gradually registered the sounds that inhabited those gardens and also the discussions with these activists, the inhabitants, and those birds talking …
Delphine SucheckiListen to the podcast here: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/l-experience/le-jardin-de-l-engrenage-4416321
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Open the sky
Robert Milin, le Petit-Nanterre, Nanterre, 2021
10 lightboxes, dimensions : 100 X 30 cm
Discreet witnesses to the links the artist has created with le Petit-Nanterre, ten lighboxes punctuate the district sharing sentences heard by Robert Milin during his Narratives not prepared by the speakers, describing situations in the ordinary of their lives, these words vibrate with memories, torments and promises. Open the sky is a journey of the district across the experience and in the eyes of those who make it alive. Delphine Suchecki Milin
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A wooden gate in Laveissière, meeting with Odette in Cantal
A sound work by Robert Milin, 58 minutes, 2021
Robert peint, photographie, 20021, Robert Milin
La cuisine chez Odette, photographie, 2021, Robert Milin
" As I was walking on a hiking trail in Cantal I passed a small hamlet of Laveissière located in the village of Marcolès. I stopped to look at the little house clad in a slightly faded white plaster. It was not an ancient building in traditional stones but a simple habitation from the sixties. It was surrounded by a large garden and outbuildings. The property was closed by boxwood hedges. A worn wooden gate opened onto a short path leading to the house. An elderly lady wearing a flower pattern apron approached me and a conversation started.
She calls herself Dédée but her first name is Odette. The building is her house, built by the end of the sixties by herself and her husband Antoine, now deceased. She has lived here alone for four years now. The village where you can do some grocery shopping is 3 km away. She has no car. She feels lonely.
A few days later, I came back. I offered to Odette I would repaint her gate. She agreed.
I visited Laveissière on several occasions over a period of two years, equipped with metal brushes, paint brushes and some paint. I also had my audio recorder with me and my camera. Conversations have begun with Dédée but also with her neighbours, passers by…"
Robert Milin, March 2021
Work available here: https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/lexperience/un-portail-a-laveissiere
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The Office Workshop is 28 years old !
A set of 26 photographs on Dibond and a piece of text on Dibond, Robert Milin, 2021
Détail, L'Atelier de l'Office a 28 ans!, Robert Milin, 2021
Détail, L'Atelier de l'Office a 28 ans!, Robert Milin, 2021
In 1993, I made a work of art based on the actions of employees of the departmental Office of HLMs in Ivry sur Seine, from paintings on the buildings, photographs, pieces of text borrowed from employees, selected by me and transferred by silkscreen on enamelled steel plates or on porcelain. A permanent installation, in situ, has come to conclude this project in the maintenance workshop of the departmental Office of HLMs[1] at 15 rue Raspail in the said city.
I was interested in the way the occupants « inhabited » these spaces, in their way of painting certain doors of their work environment with green or yellow, since these pigments were available, left over from work sites. Then, on the walls, I installed photos and pieces of text that I found in the secretaries’ drawers or the workers’ lockers, with their permission and having met them.
What interested me was to discover how these people could appear beyond their statutes, how the private could manifest itself in the public. I had felt a more or less conscious desire to fight against the sadness of the place, to make the environment more joyful without a hierarchical decision. Six years later, while certain images, simply laminated, had deteriorated, I was pleasantly surprised to find that workers and employees had mobilized to collect money to change the biggest image, the Deux Potes one overlooking the yard that we can see from the street. I renovated it on an enamelled steel plate.
This work has been in place for almost 28 years now.
Robert Milin, February, 2021
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Cleunay: its People is 20 years old
A set of 30 photographs on a Dibond plate and a piece of text on a Dibond plate, Robert Milin, 2020
Détails, Cleunay:ses gens a 20 ans!, Robert Milin, 2020
Cleunay:ses gens (1999) démontée par les agents de la ville
Cleunay is the name of a district of Rennes that back in 1950 welcomed an emergency city, the idea invented by Abbé Pierre. For the Rennes city centre inhabitants, this has resulted in long having been a deeply negative image. For the people of Cleunay to live in Cleunay was a matter of getting respect, getting bus shelters, a post office, sports fields, a social centre; it was, in the sixties a matter of living in the heart of an activist, associative community.
In 1998, the city of Rennes invited me to create an artwork there. I installed Cleunay: ses gens (Cleunay: its People), that takes the form of nine large aluminium panels linking two boulevards constituting a very busy traffic axis. They were a replica of the touristic billboards with the landscape animation generally found along motorways.
This is the form used by the technical-political authorities when inviting people to look at a landscape considered “remarkable” by them. It could be, for instance « Rennes : its Brittany Parliament » and we would see an image of this prestigious city centre monument.
Myself, I thought that there was little to see here in Cleunay but that there was a lot to be felt and experienced. Hence, my billboards came to show ordinary inhabitants and places of Cleunay.
I created them with the documents collected from people, from those who had struggled for a better life. There is a piece of text below each image referring to one or more people by their first names.
These first names were chosen from a bunch of most common first names of people encountered in the neighborhood. In my own way, I tried to monumentalize the forms of ordinary lives. Contractually, this artwork was supposed to last ten years. The city of Rennes let it live for 20 years. Given its gradual deterioration, it was decided for it to get dismantled.
This set of 30
photographs here presented in a sequential board comes to account for the process
of birth and life of a this public artwork.
Robert Milin
