Marco Dessardo
Marco Dessardo is a French sculptor born in Belgium to Italian parents. He was educated as a stone sculptor in Brussels (School «Le 75») and Paris (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris). After he has done marble pieces in Spanish where he lived for a few years, he went back to France in 1993 and began to produced sculptures from disposable objects and recycled materials. As his sculpture became gradually bigger, I get used to build them in-situ, becoming more and more influenced by local contexts. Most of the time, his later work, exhibit in outdoor places all around the word or in galleries, copy local constructions and forms and uses local artists, inhabitants, and/or materials. The sculptures became a pretext to produce stories about each place that he records in short videos. When it is possible he tries to produce a « sculpture- boat ».
Since 1995 he is also a teacher at the École Nationale Supérieure d‘Architecture de Paris-la- Villette.
Chosen Works
Kazan Maru
For this project, the artist went to Ōshima Island (Japan) and decided to get off (he doesn’t like be stuck on an island) building an ultra light canoe with local bamboo and one sheet of white tyveck paper.
3.5 x 0.4 x 0.65 m, bamboo, rope, glue, tyveck paper, plastic bottles.
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Courage, Fuyons!
Four boats re-shaped by the experience of the waves. Before being exhibited in Brussels, they have crossed the European’s seas alongside the migratory flux. The design of this sculptures came from drawings of the neighborhood children.
15 x 15 m, mixed media
Garboatage (Project)
Garboatage is a floating sculpture project made out of local collected rowing boats sewed together and fulfilled with collected plastic bottles. Garboatage is an attempt to become a local boat builder in Korpoo (Finland) and a navigator in the Archipelago. The sculpture should be navigable.
11 m x 2 m x 2.6 m (37 ft), recycled plastic rowing boats, ropes and recycled plastic bottles
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Scientific background
Local Boats ?
Some years ago, Thomas Thwaites, a British designer, tried to build a toaster from scratch. Doing that, he had to mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil and traveling in an important number of countries. As he said, his naive project was a partial success. Indeed, his homemade toaster toasted during 5 seconds before it burned.
One of the issues of the work of Marco Dessardo is the idea of building something from local and cheap materials. Each one of his sculpture is subject to this rule. In our globalized world, the problem of the transportation of goods and more precisely the transportation of building material is worrying as much as the impossibility to create by itself a large part of the industrialized products. In this context, the mentioned works of art can question the possibility of a local building boat industry.
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At the end of the sixties, two twenty years old french men decided to cross the world with a boat they designed : the Damien. The trip last more than four years and became the subject of a famous book : Damien around the world. This boat, built with a little budget, is now a myth in the navigation history. But if the two boys partially design their vessel in La Rochelle (France), they did it with the help of a ship designer coming from Great Britain and with a lot of elements and materials that weren’t produced in this area.
For example, the hull was made of mahogany and northern pine. The mahogany is a type of wood discovered in the Americas and it can be found in some jungles. There also exists plantations of mahogany and some places as the Fiji. Northern pine can be found in hight latitudes of the globe. Obviously, those materials didn’t come from La Rochelle.
More than that, we found on the Damien various complex equipment as a Nirvana mast, a Sarma rigging, a wing with terylene tissu, a Couach BD 2 engine... The work made on a boat yard lasted many months. The Damien is just an example, and actually it is a little and simple vessel compared to actual trawlers or cruise ships.
Even if the size and the function are totally different, we can oppose those yards to the imagery built by some manufactures as the classical Canadian Chestnut Canoe Company which used to built iconic Canoes with the wood of the surrounding.
A similar tradition for a particular little handmade vessel can be found in Norway where a wooden rowing boat called Oselvar has becoming part of the tradition. This kind of boat firstly appeared thousand years ago and was used by the Vikings all around the North Sea get his actual name in the late twentieth century when two boatbuilders installed their work shop at the mouth of the Os river. This historic tradition represents a classic combination of resources, household, craft and skill: the farmerboatbuilders of the fjord region, with good access to the pine forest, built and sold boats to the fisherman-farmers in the coastal district. These boats where made locally, with local materials and for local peoples. In a region with many Fjord, it was used for everything - fishing, transports of goods, animals, going to the church and the city.
Many Oselvar boats were destroyed as a consequence of the fact that the Oselvar no longer were in daily use after 1960. For the boatbuilders it was no longer profitable to build such boats and many find themselves other work instead. For a while it seemed like the Oselvar boat is going to completely disappear. In order to secure the knowledge of building Oselvar boats a publicly funded workshop called Oselvarverkstaden opened in Os where young boatbuilders learns boatbuilding by building new boats, repairing old boats, doing documentation and research.
Methods
« Marco Dessardo is a sculptor. All around the world.
When invited, he comes with a project and a limited set of tools. After a reasonable moment of wandering and drinking coffees, he inserts his creation made of local material. Most of the time, the project is executed, but the output is always unexpected, highly influenced by local context. Most often the sculpture turns out to be a sort of useful stuff. Or a long stuff, floating sometimes, a house, a link with... other stuff.
As a conclusion, he tries to make films on the spot. To tell stories. When photos and films are uploaded to dessardo.com, the sculpture is declared completed. »
Strategy, dessardo.com
Introductory video of the Bergen Garbage Boat project
Keywords
The work of Marco Dessardo is close to the Italian « Arte Povera » artistic movement. The materials used in his pieces are commonplace, cheap and easily accessible. They belong to the everyday life and a part of the artistic process is to subvert them to their usual function. With his passion for the disposable objects and the act of recycling, he has developed the habite to quietly fix the broken things on his different working places.
Working from a particular context and creating in-situ pieces, he uses to do « as local people do ». He likes to copy, parts, forms or habits of the surrounding environment and most of his sculptures question the notion of perversion. He regularly work with inhabitants or local artists.
Great fan of Borges, the finality of each work is to tell a little, absurd and poetic story about the place it comes from. On the artist’s website we can found short movies that have recorded those stories, as the last traces of the projects.
When he was a child, he wanted to be three things : a sculptor, a traveler and a navigator. He has achieved his goal in making sculptural boats in a variety of countries, island and continents. That is the story he likes to tell the most, a tall of an escape by the sea, on a simple and man-made vessel.
References and links
http://dessardo.com/
https://fiskerimuseum.museumvest.no/english/ https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ http://www.gerardjanichon-damien.fr/en/damien-le-bateau/ https://www.greenworldlumber.com/blog/mahogany-tree https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Chestnut_Canoe_Company https://www.oselvarverkstaden.no/
https://kjellmag.no/dokmntr//Brest%202008.pdf https://www.oselvarverkstaden.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/THE-OSELVAR-BOAT-YARD- From-concept-to-reality-.pdf