For the festival, Alice Bidault will present two works inspired by the Inca quipu, an ingenious, unique and extremely precise system for recording anything that might prove useful to the empire, which had no written language. To this day, they remain indecipherable.
“I have defined my own code (knots, colour, punctuation etc.) to transcribe our alphabet into a tangible object. The transcription is painstakingly long and meditative. The chosen text takes shape out of context and becomes an autonomous, portable fragment of culture.”
Alice Bidault attempts, through her research, to define the concept of contemporary archaeology. This idea encompasses the intersection of history and collective memory with architecture within a fieldwork context. It acknowledges the absence of elements or the lack of context as potential generators of fictions, prompting a reflection on our relationships with knowledge and the role that artists play in shaping it.