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The rainbow roundabout in Saint Pierre des Corps
The roundabout was done 4 years ago in a neighborhood with buildings and small houses.
My workshop is in an old market gardener’s born next to the roundabout. This neighborhood carries me into various… , different languages and cultures.
It’s a major, quiet and windy roundabout.
Starting from those caracteristics, I suggested a work based on two universal symbols : wind and the rainbow.

The wind , “from everywhere blow
The winds of life” (Jean Vindras)
The wind underlines this link to nature and geography. It never stops giving vibrationand movement.
The wind is a feeling of the elsewhere in the HERE but also from the here it goes ELSEWHERE.
I chose to capture it daily with the help of a bird, like WEATHER-VANE of great wingspan (175cm).
Its profile is inspired by mamy birds ; the albatross. The greylag goose and the barnacle goose. They are all migratory birds dream holders as well as stories and hope carriers. They fly nose in the air.

The rainbow

A rainbow is an fleeting but universal moment that inspired in every culture poetical developments. Some of them I was able to mention during the inauguration.
The rainbow is materialized in the roundabout by 39 concrete poles. They are all painted with a different colour of the palette.
The rainbow unwinds itself for the one who around it on bicycle, in a car or on foot.
The monochromes circle around the primary red face the south on 3 rows. Their height goes from 1,80m outside of the circle to 2,20m in the center.
The blues face the north east, the yellows the north west. The bird overlooks the whole on a higher and thicker pole (2,80m) coloured in light grey.
There was something important that had to be taken into account when designing the roundabout: the poles couldn’t be too close from one another, they needed both at the same time to stop but also to let go the eyes of the driver. The perception he had of it couldn’t be too details or absorbing.

The inauguration

This inauguration was well followed by the people and ended with an interesting symbolical action suggested by the municipality.
Everybody there had to choose a coloured piece of cloth and had to hang it on one of the wires set in a circle. The instruction was that each piece of clothe had to touch at least another me.
Since it was put up the roundabout lives well and it seems to be used more and more as a landmark in the neighborhood, or rather in the different neighborhoods connectings to it.
This work that I see almost everyday deeply satisfies me and I hope to make others.
Differents ones after having observed the constituent elements, habits and symbols of every area.