Alain Bernardini was born in France in 1960. He lives in Vitry-sur-Seine and works in most places.
After being a high school student (for a brief period), an apprentice stonemason, a nothing, a domestic, a window cleaner and a partner in a cleaning business, he spent almost thirty years in the study of plastic arts and literature. He sets the world of work at the centre of his art, and while continuing to work, has been exhibiting regularly since 1992.
Every Thursday for ten years, he rubs shoulders with some twenty gardeners in the parks of the Northern Paris suburbs. He depicts these municipal landscapes and the gardeners by using performance reading, slide shows, drawing instruments, videos and machines.
For five years now, he has been attempting to produce other representations of the labour world. Workers in textile factories, food processing, canneries, vehicle construction, agricultural machinery and printing are his models. As actors in his photographic and videographic productions, they introduce the surreal and the strange into the everyday life of the production floor. He is no longer interested in the normal activities of workers, work acted out again or hieratic portraits. He is after something else, energies different from those deployed in the business world. His aim is to catch the workers, while at work, acting in ways that represent them in pause, inactivity, play, forbidden situations – a kind of common challenge to the every day life of the business or the factory, and a paradoxical play on the illicit, which cannot be obtained without the support of the employers.
Resident as part of the pre-configuration of CENT QUATRE, Alain pictures the workers at 104 Rue d’Aubervilliers as well as the former employees of the Funeral Service.
