The artist explores the collections of the Saint-Raymond archaeology museum and encounters single busts. He imagines bringing them together.

For Le Nouveau Printemps, in dialogue with the collections of Toulouse’s archaeology museum, Soufiane Ababri has conceived a bench-sculpture. The piece brings to mind the ancient statues on view inside the museum, which came from the most exceptional Roman villa in Gaul so far discovered, in the 19th century in Chiragan, about sixty kilometers from Toulouse. Used to working inside (the Bedworks series featured the artist in bed, drawing), Ababri delved into the museum’s collections online, came across a number of single busts, and came up with the idea of bringing two together. In so doing, with the collaboration of designer Frédéric Imbert, he gave shape to a carnal union between two bodies and two periods. The work constitutes a welcome place to sit and meet others. It is also a vantage point on the surroundings, and people’s comings and goings, that plays on what is hidden and what is concealed. The sculpture invites a reconsideration of soulmate myths, and the idea of a radical friendship between two beings united by love.

“Now when their nature was divided in two, each half in longing rushed to the other half of itself and they threw their arms around each other and intertwined them, desiring to grow together into one, dying of hunger and inactivity too because they were unwilling to do anything apart from one another. Whenever any of the halves died and the other was left, the one left sought out another and embraced it.”
Symposium, Plato.

Produced by Le Nouveau Printemps
With the support of Musée Saint-Raymond and Monuments de Toulouse – Toulouse city hall