Through a plastic, aesthetic, and theoretical revaluation of the found objects and litter that he collects on his global travels, which form the primary material for his sculptural works, artist Ari Bayuaji reflects on the downsides of our daily practices. In the exhibition No Place Like Home<\/em> (2017), for example, he highlights the disparities, depending on the culture, among our economic, ecological, and poetic relationships with the objects that surround us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deeply attached to his homeland of Indonesia, where he was an engineer before moving to Montr\u00e9al in 2005, Bayuaji launched an art community project in Bali in 2020 called Weaving the Ocean<\/em>. In the face of the economic crisis that hit the island due to the pandemic, he initiated the creation of a local microeconomy by mobilizing people who had lost their livelihoods. These people assisted him in various stages of his creative process, from collecting plastic rope fragments caught in the mangroves of Sanur to unravelling them to make new thread that would be wound and handwoven using traditional Balinese methods. The exhibition The Ocean Called Home<\/em> (2023) recently presented the fruits of this collective labour in the form of plastic fabrics, whose abstract compositions evoke the light and other phenomena associated with the ocean landscape, and sculptural pieces that combine plastic waste with natural components. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his practice, Bayuaji rethinks the notion of \u201chome\u201d at the intersection of nature and culture. At a time when this stance seems more porous and obsolete, especially in Indonesia, where rising sea levels threaten human habitats, Weaving the Ocean<\/em> resonates by critically highlighting the emblematic causes of these natural tragedies (water pollution by plastic) and the efforts made to restore, reappropriate, and sublimate this part of nature, rendered inexorably hostile through the effects of climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Candidat au doctorat en histoire de l\u2019art \u00e0 l\u2019UQAM et \u00e0 l\u2019Universit\u00e9 de Grenoble (France), Valentin Bec pr\u00e9pare une th\u00e8se sur les enjeux historiques, anthropologiques et th\u00e9oriques de l\u2019attrait pour l\u2019indiff\u00e9rent qui traverse la peinture n\u00e9erlandaise du 17^{e<\/sup> si\u00e8cle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}

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