Pascale Marthine Tayou has used objects found during his stay in Liverpool for his installation in the Exchange Flags building. The piece, called Le Chantier, also includes a video he shot in Sete in the south of France. It documents a particularly dangerous local event: Le Joute. Tayou’s poetic description of this ancient spectacle can also be read as an attack on social and political complacency, a theme he has returned to repeatedly in his writing as well as his art:

Movement / Energy

there is the public . . .

contradiction,

people find pleasure in the tension, like a new fashion of life,

like a new way of social truth

maybe we live with some kind of tension inside us?

and then this can explode,

like some kind of crash,

like volcanoes,

the burning flood

takes everything that crosses its path,

it gets settled into our deepest society.

This will transform in society, and we'll get obliterated to

respect this.