Nicolas Raufaste’s artistic work can’t be detached by a personal research on the history and the origin of consumer goods. At the same time, his personal work is strictly related to the artistic collaboration with the Rodynam Collective, a group working in the Minoterie, a temporary art center for contemporary art, located at the Rodynam mill’s hold factory.
The practice of recycling of industrial spaces, more generally of what goes to waste is an integral part of Nicolas Raufaste’s poetics, that being focused on a peculiar analysis of the process of creation which takes it to be as any other productive process.
Recycling against overproduction and a kind of minimalism which is more a political choice than a formal attitude: these are the guide lines of Raufaste’s work. The materials used by Raufaste are in nearly every case recyclable ones, as banana’s skin the “natural packaging” of the fruit, as well as the final outcome of a productive and historical process, made of colonial and post-colonial heritage.
The image of globalised economy is a combination of narrative/evocative forms (the packaging, the advertisement, the brand) and standardized forms (the containers which brings the consumer goods, the factories that produce them, the commercial centers that distribute them). Such an aesthetic difference is an illusion anyway: products and industries are in fact most of the time under the same multinational. Histories and forms established by the brand cohabit with the history and form modified by the time. In Nicolas Raufaste’s work such a contradictory interconnection (interplay) is expressed (told) through (by means of) traces, as a sort of archeological reconstruction made of industrial ruins, spot and lost belongings (objects).