Blowing is not playing
The artist Jean-Luc Bichaud draws his inspiration from nature. Among other experiments, he grafts elements of the living in order to constitute hybrid beings. Nesting boxes, fishing floats or gardeners make up the artist's universe, both terrestrial and aquatic. Here, he is interested in bird calls, instruments used by hunters to deceive small game and originally made from olive pits, cherry pits, splinters of wood or bark, feathers or even snail shells.
This collection of fifty bird calls, accompanied by didactic labels, constitutes a sort of inventory of bird songs that inhabit the forest. Theoretically intended to be played, the small instruments with strange shapes are supposed to reproduce the real or imaginary songs of the European birdlife. They lend themselves to a plastic and phonetic game. Jean-Luc Bichaud hijacks the scientific codes of museography.
He has in fact gathered heterogeneous instruments without any acoustic vocation: still, watering can head, syringe, etc. Conceived as a decoy, this suspicious assembly incites the visitor to remain on the lookout and to assume the role of a game or a bird, deceived by a mechanical sound.
