THE STILT WALKER
La démarche de l’échassière

June 2019, Geneva, Head James Fazzy
Carved pine wood, metal, raw pine resin, rosin, pine tree barks, latex, ceramic, oil painting on wood.

This installation and performance comes from a research on pine resin and its extraction. In the moors of south west of France, hectares of maritime pine forests were planted for the production of wood and resin.
I went to meet former resin workers, called gemmeurs in french, in a small village : Lesperon. They showed me how to do pine tapping, how to use the different tools they utilized until the 80s to prick the trees and they offered me a few liters of crude resin.

The gestures of the profession are spectacular especially when it comes to climbing 4 meters high to make a notch through a meticulous violence : the process has precise rules to avoid exhausting the trees.
The process of pine-tapping reveals the relationship of domination that man maintains with nature, it can end with the death of the tree if it is not carried out with care.

I interpreted the gemmeurs artisanal tools :
the traditional stilts local shepherds were wearing to walk and supervise their herd, the ladders called «piteys» in the Landes slang, and the pots with which they harvested the resin.
In the performance, these tools are the creation of the character of a fable: the stilt-walker. The stilt walker is a woman excluded from society developping a strategy to survive alone in the woods: she begins to draw on the resources and substance of the forest, and discovers the beneficial properties of the resin. Her forest being destroyed she then finds shelter on a parking’s corner under the trainstation.

She embodies breathless nature. She has a global awareness of her environment, «to see the world better just look at it a little higher» says the perched baron from Italo Calvino. 
​
with: Claire Vallet