Michel François

The varied oeuvre of Michel François comprises photographs, videos, drawings and sculptures which are closely connected with each other through the richness of their ideas. They reveal both a fine sense of aesthetics and considerable social engagement. Michel François turns the ordinary into something special, often by means of simple interventions. He photographed, for example, the ‘knots’ in the bark of trees as though they are eyes. He designed postcards for prisoners with a bird’s eye view of their prison, so that they would get a total view of the place they were confined in. For the 9th Sonsbeek exhibition in 2001 he created a closed space under the famous waterfall in the park, in which you could see but not hear the rushing water. Eliminating hearing resulted in an enormous  intensification of seeing, like watching a film without sound.

For the current Sonsbeek exhibition he has taken a 25-year old lime tree weighing 20,000 kilos and laid it horizontally on a narrow pedestal, with root ball and all. The tree will have to be intensely cared for the whole summer in order to keep it alive, which means that its character will totally change. Instead of a powerful element of nature it becomes a metaphor for uprooting, for the search for balance, as well as for the play of forces between heaven and earth. It is transformed, in short, into a mental image.

For the Procession a younger lime tree was carried horizontally by the Guild of Sportsmen and Sportswomen. The root ball was too heavy to be lifted by hand and lay on a trolley.