Materials : 110 x 0.70 meters of black folded paper
Dimension : 1.70 x 1.70 meters

Exhibition view at Slick Art Fair (Duplex gallery)

This spiral staircase is based on a real scale, equivalent to a twenty floor building with 320 steps. But paradoxically, it has no verticality but a thickness of layers instead. Each thin floor is made of 16 steps, in reference to the hexadecimal system which is used in digital electronics and computer engineering.

I grew up in a valley. Any where I had to go, I had to walk up and down stairs. Some of them were frightening, especially at night, and others were well-known because of their severity. The ones close to the college were named "the 144 steps". For a long time, stairs have represented to me the climbing up of the social ladder and the vertical power. Stairs is a means of communication between spaces and people. But in the late nineties, Internet and the Web in particular was popularized as a global network of horizontal, interactive communication. During the dot-com bubble at the end of the nineties, the press was referring to young companies organized in a horizontal structure with no real director. At the same period, some artists like me were involved in Internet as an utopia for collaborative platform. Today, this dream for collective and shareable practice has become a business for Facebook or Myspace...

The spiral staircase in origami reveals to me the ambiguity or shifting between vertical and horizontal social structure.