30 Jours

It is a 3 parts artwork, created during August 2021 by the Rwandan-Swiss artist Gilles Dusabe, within the framework of the 39th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul in Quebec, whose theme was "Time and Things".

The first part is a series of 30 rectangular cardboard, punched in various places by circular punches of different diameters, allowing to leave on the cardboard holes of different sizes. The second part is made of 30 press articles, reporting local, regional, national or international news. And the third component of the artwork,  called "the foam of time", is made of small circular nuggets of cardboard, resulting from the punching.

Inspired by the work of the Japanese artist On Kawara, Gilles Dusabe decided to approach the theme of Time by creating a artwork each day, representing a news item or a debate published in a press article. For 30 days, he retransmitted on punched cardboard his feelings about these readings. 

There is for example an article reporting on floods in India,  which led him to create a painting made of small holes close to each other, like a stream flowing down the painting. Another example is an article about the massacres of rhinos in South Africa, which inspired him to create a cardboard, in which the different holes constitute a cartography of the places where these poor animals died. There is also this article about a murder somewhere in Quebec, which on the cardboard is represented by holes referring to bullet holes.

Each work was created as an independent piece of art, the 30 of them hung on 3 lateral rows maintain a dialogue between the different parts and constitute a unity that makes sense. It’s a story told in several acts, a testimony of what happened in some places of the world during this month of August 2021.   

While initially the articles were the basis of the creation, as the days went by, the artwork took over and the artist began to look for articles that would allow him to create continuity between the cardboards and incorporate some visual narrative to the overall work.

In 30 Days, the theme of Time and Things is expressed both in the temporality of the creation and in the technique chosen. For Gilles Dusabe, punching is a metaphor for Time, a testimony of something that has been there, an event that has taken place and has left traces: the holes in the boxes and the circular nuggets.

But the work itself is expressed in two stages. First, we have access to the physical work represented by these grey cardboards riddled with holes, but there is another work behind this first one. An immaterial and ephemeral work, created by the beams of light passing through the various holes. A work that can be momentarily put in place by anyone observing the paintings, by illuminating them with the flashlight of a cell phone.