“Since 2008, the economic crisis has gradually become a social, human crises affecting people’s daily lives. It has destroyed and held back both the middles classes and more vulnerable populations. Our means of action are reduced. With the magnitude of this epidemic, it seems impossible to contain: the parameters and causes elude us. It seems beyond our control or comprehension. What can we do to defend ourselves?”
Régis Perray has come up with a solution: bunkers. The project involves taking refuge in a cardboard bunker installed in the city of Nantes (partially bombed during the Second World War). A makeshift structure tailored to the scale of his seated body houses this artist who is questioning not only his own survival, but also that of an entire part of our society. He has chosen to close himself off inside a bunker made from cardboard found on the city’s sidewalks. All of it is assembled with electrical tape, a solid and insulating adhesive. It’s like a child’s dream, building one’s own cabin.
But the dream gives way to a much harsher reality. The shelter is vulnerable to the weather, like man in his current, troubling situation…”
—Extract from a text by Julie Crenn
Régis Perray was born in Nantes in 1970. After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, he turned his attention to various grounds, and more specifically to their cleaning and maintenance. In cemeteries, religious buildings, studios and abandoned houses, Perray documents himself “dusting” their floors using simple tools, literally putting his body to work. Some of his interventions have gone to absurd extremes, as when he attempted, in a Sisyphean act, to sweep clear the road leading to the Pyramids of Gaza in 1999. Perray’s attempts to restore “legibility” to lands and territories are a kind of “aesthetic archeology”. He has undertaken projects in France, Germany, Belgium, Egypt, Poland and South Korea
