POST MILIEU, Stichting Kaus Australis, Rotterdam (NL), 2004

   137 Melanchtonweg, an artist foundation built and run by artists. This is where Séverine Hubard elaborates Post Milieu, a performance installation open to the public from the 10th to 26th of September 2004 on Kaus Austarlis' site.
   The foundation consists in a 40 per 30 meters building intirely dismantable. On three of its sides is a garden and it opens on a big surface (parking lot) which the bottom is occupied by trailers and containers. The foundation's site is surrounded by a stock of urban furnitures, a railway, petrol pumps and a rubbish dump called Milieu Park. It is in this rubbish dump that Séverine H., every morning watches out for the flow of cars, trucks and pickups with their cargos like one would wait for the delivery man, before taking from the dumper a sample, more or less voluminous, of the consumption.
   The rejects heap defines the day work ; the environmental dispositive elaborates itself by days. Past reliefs taken to graze, for a while, emerging here and there in this « transhumance du rebut » (transhumance of reject). That is not the question for Séverine H. to evoque a past life but to shift those broken functionalities and to reorganise them in a moving world which life is the source. Tables, wood beds, doors or simple planks assembled and re-assembled on paddles represent as much ingredients, details of a bigger construction which invades the site. A domestic river, unifies for a while the rubbish dump and the buildings of the foundation. The whole of it creates Post Milieu, an experimental environment on the borderline of architecture, sculpture and performance.

    This piece of upside down life occupies the closed depression of the studio, seeps through doors and the corridor before reaching to the open parking lot. One finds passages for the body, interstices for the hand, loopholes for the eyes; the larger paths stands out, large enough for a fork-lift truck, before narrowing in a maze of streets. Post Milieu represents finally an overflowing and living no-man's land, in the way of a mark, moving, ready to occupy the centre, the periphery and the interstices of the site. At the end of september shall come the fall. In the way of a wild river which would invert its course to flow into its source, objects and fragments re-adjusted will go back to the dumpers of Milieu Park. In an time where it seems that one expects from artists politically correct productions to the detriment of attempts of transformations or true reversal of the perceptible, Séverine H. confronts silently and frontally our society and its capacity to produce dead substance. she succeeds by a clever succession of negation, in rooting out life out of it, in re-adjusting potential. It is without a word, by the strong mean of silence that Séverine H. extends a « bad habit » wich has already seen her set her installations on fire or destroying another by kicking it. The disappearing of the objects must only be an appeal to life.

Christophe Boulanger.
Translated by Noé Paccosi.