Marie Vic’s Blowing Riccardo started with a mundane conversation about the traveling life of fashion collections on their many editorial tours. In this work, Vic borrowed a handful of Givenchy garments from a Parisian fashion collector and took them on a trip, to an aircraft graveyard in the Mojave Desert, in California. There, she had them wander endlessly and float among retired carcasses. The result is a series of glowing images that take the viewer into an anthropomorphic and hypnotic experience – a conjuring act of mise-en-scène.
Visionaire: Explain briefly the thoughts behind the nine films?
Marie Vic: Blowing Riccardo spans over multiple films. Each film focuses on a garment, presented as a distinct subject, but the series is meant to be looked at as a whole, with all the different videos playing simultaneously. The idea was to create a sort of community, a community of loners. I wanted to do a work where you would heavily feel the lightness of a dancing dress… you know, that old unbearable lightness of being.
Visionaire: The films are accompanied by Blow-up, can you tell us about those?
Marie Vic: Blow-Up is a series of large scale images extracted from the films, they are displayed on billboards in lower Manhattan. These Blow-Ups are the monumental memory of a moment, when garments floated among carcasses. And ironically, the commercial nature of the billboard turns that moment into a commodity.
Visionaire: Why did you go to the Mojave desert to shoot? What is the connection between an airport and Tisci’s garments?
Marie Vic: I wanted to see symbols of luxury mingling with a dusty, decadent, environment. The aircraft cemetery in the Mojave desert was the perfect setting for this work. It was very melancholic: sunny and dark at the same time. This resonated with Riccardo Tisci’s work in my mind’s eye.
Visionaire: How did you find the aircraft boneyard?
Marie Vic: I found the aircraft boneyard on 6th avenue, on a cold winter’s night. They were showing Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ideology at IFC Center. At some point in the film, Žižek takes us to the Mojave desert, in that resting site for abandoned planes. He chose that location to epitomize the waste generated by capitalist societies. I found the images very powerful. The squandered landscape looked so impressive under the bright light of California. So I went on a trip to see the place and it is true: the feeling of waste and nothingness was immense. There was a paradox there that I thought was the perfect context for a work focusing on chiffon. There are things out there which serve nothing and i find it interesting to accept it.