Carbon Series (Megève)

Installation

Timber harvested in the woods around the chalet in Megève, the logs of which will be brought inside the house using a bicycle powered by a chainsaw, according to the resources of the vehicle.
The proposed work will be carried out with a bicycle similar to the one used in the first project of the Carbon series, designed by Mikael Pedersen. This bike is used daily by the artist and chosen by him for its unique conformation, which makes it possible to motorise the front wheel and thus continue to use the pedals to move the rear wheel and tackle even difficult mountain routes.
The result of the work, which includes an important initial performative intervention by the artist, is the bicycle that has become a hybrid vehicle with the help of the chainsaw chain, its load of logs and a small pile of wood placed near the bicycle.
The work describes one of the characteristic features of Simon’s work, which is circularity. The artist uses unrelated technologies, elements and narratives to create a path that starts from personal experiences and from the observation and appropriation of customs that are foreign to him, making them his own and uniting them in a circular path.

Part performance, part design project, this ongoing series of works realized in a number of locations over the past fifteen years as a way to physically ground the practice those places, gives the chainsaw motor at its heart a double life as both a device for chopping and subsequently transporting logs. Originally inspired by both a particularly resourceful piece of Cuban makeshift-technology, a chainsaw driven bicycle, and the design of the French ‘VéloSoleX’ moped, this hybrid machine, which has at its core an elegant green bicycle originally designed by the Danish engineer and inventor Mikael Pederesen circa 1896, was used on the 24 th May 2022 to cut and transport ‘locally sourced’ timber from the surrounding forests. This private performance will ultimately be documented by a simple publication.