Claude Eigan, Untitled. Photography by Maansi Jain
Though she stepped away from the drudgery of 40-hour week office life in 2012, many of Claude Eigan’s artworks examine elements of the mundane in the workplace. As they say: you can take the girl out of work but you can’t make her stop making work about work – even if artwork overtime is largely unpaid.
The Berlin based French artist’s recent piece, “…Like Pepsi Cola” is a “portrait series” that uses a publically exposable human feature to shed a cheeky light on the lack of women in the Harvard Business Review list of top performing CEOs. She makes you laugh while being officially PG rated and making you think about the mothers of these men and the strange and exclusionary workplace environments that engender these kinds of uneven lists.
Claude Eigan, “…Like Pepsi Cola”
Taking more from notes from the second home of office goers for her upcoming solo show, Claude Eigan mused on her time as a graphic designer in San Francisco. She describes taking meetings in large, soulless rooms, listening to the ocean and the seabirds, as if she were describing an aquarium where the fish are the only snorkelers. Human presence is not required here; in fact, it’s rather discouraged because human bodies would disturb the sleepiness of the scene. “I would find myself in these big conference rooms that in most cases lack any soul and identity,” Claude says. “Yet you could hear the sea coming from outside, which is a weird experience because at the same time these rooms are so isolated and made for you to focus.”
Imagining herself a witness to fallow spaces created for humans, Claude has been working on a new series of sculptures that transmute objects. These were almost “too generic to be noticed” as she found them in their original habitats: conference rooms and office buildings.
Claude Eigan, Untitled. Photography by Maansi Jain
Claude Eigan, Untitled. Photography by Maansi Jain
Claude Eigan in her studio. Photography by Maansi Jain
The voice conferencing sound station has become a stingray and the wires make for animated tails. She considers what life may form in a dead zone: “the conference phone becomes useless but its actual shape becomes apparent,” she says. “The conference room becomes a place where everything is slowly evolving, following its own rhythm, its own rules.” The metaphor is not unintentional. Efficiency and order are eschewed for a fluid experience of a meeting room when it is not in use. And whether you, personally, heard the tree fall doesn’t really matter because Claude is more interested in the life in landscapes that have no human presence.
Perhaps, it is for that reason Claude keeps a studio in the east Berlin neighbourhood of Lichtenberg, where she can choose whether she sees a human face or not on any given day. Surrounded by car dealerships and many, many gas stations, Claude says: “this area is still defined as an ‘industrial area’ so that means no restaurants or bars can be there, which can be a little bit annoying…” But on the plus side that’s also what stokes her drive to work work work.
Claude Eigan’s “Comfort Zone”, curated by Kerstin Godschalk, is at HB55’s L’espace de L’espece, Berlin, from 8 July to 21 July 2016