Christian Guémy, C215 is a street artist from France. Photography © Courtesy of C215
1.In your opinion what is the role of a museum?
A museum is a physical place that keeps safe and unchanged artworks or objects and that set them available for being seen to visitors and external public.
2.What are your favorite museums in the world? Why?
Being French I have a crush for the Louvre Museum, the first museum ever where I cried in front of a painting. A museum is also a place where you set up your own memories: love stories, children of yours that you initiate, emotions in front a physical artwork that you see at least in the flesh after knowing it from books or internet.
3.How important are social networks in your business? And which platform do you prefer and why.
The COVID-19 lockdown has been accelerating a former evolution, which is a more direct touch with the public combined with internet display: in French we say “desintermediation” and “dematerialisation”.
I experienced it a little more, but street artists are keen to that from the begining, since we went in the streets in the 2000’s precisely to escape galleries, curators, critics etc. and being in touch directly to the public.
Museums went in the streets then as well, becoming competitors in that evolution… but museums have a lot to lose, because they have to keep value to the building they have, which is their strength and value, their root, while streetartists are artistic snipers. At the end of dematerialisation, museums will lose their income, and their “reason to be” (raison d’être).
4.In particular, due to the coronavirus emergency, how have you changed your business on social networks?
It is time for a great “social distancing” (sanitary distance between people) to open museum by night, which would display better conditions to watch the collections with less public. Simple but necessary.
Interview by Fabio Pariante, journalist
MORE
Christian Guémy, C215 on social networks: Twitter – Instagram – Facebook
Christian Guémy aka C215 (Bondy, 1973) is a French street artist specialized in stencil and graffiti.
Guémy studied at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where he obtained his PhD in History of Art and started his career with spray painting in 2005: today the artist is one of the best and most productive stencil artists on the international scene. His technique is based on carving the figure several times with different colors, and this makes his signature easily identifiable.
His works are found in the streets all over the world: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Napoli, Tel Aviv, Vatican City, Djerba, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Rome, New Delhi, Moscow, London, Athens, Jerusalem and Paris, where Guémy lives.
