Matt Coco

I conduct open research in various fields of installation work, which borrow from other disciplines and their lexicons, methods and forms. I am drawn to a particular material, a place or an event, and develop a constantly evolving experiment based on them, which takes the momentary form of an exhibition.

Some of my pieces are envisioned as graphic or spatial scores – and by “score”, I mean a chance to write something, to create a matrix that will give birth to an infinite formal pile-up and generate new events, objects or sounds. The sum of elements that make up a space can be seen as a language awaiting interpretation, with its underlying clamour, breaks, shifts, pressures and frictions…

My work also positions itself in response to the space that houses it. I use its history and its acoustic, geological or architectural specificities in order to find in them the material that will enable me to fashion new pieces or update older ones. I try to establish a connection between location and language, and to question the way in which context can generate a certain type of writing, a set of communicational codes and spatial representations.

Sometimes, natural or man-made disasters can act as starting points. Whether they are considered breaking points or changes in direction, these events can be both beginnings and endings. My aim is to transpose these faults in reality into poetic objects. Time acts as a construction process (appearance, deposition, superimposition) or, on the contrary, as a disorganising process (erasure, disintegration), and manifests through the updating of pieces in the course of their various presentations and through the layering of these interventions.

I frequently use an imprinting process achieved with various materials (ceramic, silicone, latex, clay, fabric), techniques (outlining, rubbing), or sound. This type of intervention gives the object a hybrid quality, which combines reproduction, the existence of opposites and the potential for differential shifts – a system in which the location, the event and time can coexist.