Nik Geene: Family is a 3-Letter Word: Site-Specific | Paris

Family is a 3-Letter Word, 2019 is the latest iteration of Geene's series that began with I got life, mother [...].

In contrast to that first work, which is economically pegged to real estate values, Family [...] is physically pegged to the site of the city's largest pedestrian plaza- Paris' Place de la Republique.

For Family, Geene cast near identical twin waves of concrete, using the curvy wood scaffold from Pique Nique as molds. Twelve hours later, while the concrete was still wet and in the process of curing, the sculpture was installed on a rainy day at Place de la Republique. The sculpture glistened, in recline like interlocked lovers, above pools of rain that inverted images of the peripheral buildings, lamp posts, and trees; in the puddles, the horizon is invited to the ground.

Before concrete fully cures, it is fragile, susceptible to cracks and other misshapen incidents. Geene's entropic gesture of placing the sculpture while soft, undercuts concrete's rigid monumental status to frame instead its formless, sandy origins. Ultimately, a web of external forces—from the weather to passers-by—is given tacit permission to affect the sculpture's end form as it hardens day by day.

Transgressing the bounds of permission, however, is the prevalence of the public sculpture itself. Placed without legal sanction in a situationist revival, the work occupies prime real estate on the plaza. Family nods to the two monuments in its proximity, sisters of liberty: the statue of Marianne—the very personification of the French Republic—, and the ramps of a modest skate park.

Left to dissolve under the competing forces of skaters, law enforcers, and truants alike, the sculpture hints at its own undoing: a return to equilibrium.