TAFAA – SIGNAL (Le Chant des lucioles), 2022

Public commission - Cultural percent of Yverdon-les-bains

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Collège des Rives, Yverdon-les-bains, Switzerland

Differently visible day and night, TAFAA – SIGNAL (Le chant des Lucioles) emerges in the urban environment of the Collège des Rives. Inspired by the neon signs marking an era, this work refers to time as a symbolic value that invests our beings and our perceptions.

This metal footprint with a glass frame, through which the ivy makes its way as time passes, refers to the trace, the passage, the memory.

As grafted to the metal structure, the neon lights indicate by their different shapes and colors parts of the anatomy like a plantar reflexology map suggesting the miniaturization of the human body and its faculties of self-regulation. Like an unexpected crossroads, the sculpture is similar to the metaphor of a half-organic, half-technical body in the image of our lives where life and technology seem to merge ever more.

Chloé Delarue is thus interested in the way these symbols travel through time, while being part of our present in a unique way. From neon that has apparently become obsolete to an ancestral medicine that uses the human body as its only tool, the technological acceleration of our societies here questions the possibility of contemplating a work that punctuates day and night. As for the natural growth of plants, it signals, like an allegorical hourglass, that what is “out of time” continues to exist.