Having begun his artistic career with drawing and video, two practices that require relatively little space, Denis Savary freed himself from the need for a traditional studio. For him, the space of creation is wherever he happens to be. We meet the artist while he is editing his next film, in a place where his living and working spaces are one and the same.
It was in Granges-Marnand that Denis Savary produced his first films, including one in which a hurdy-gurdy player plays his melodies in the foreground, while motocross bikes circle in a gravel pit in the background. “I don’t consider the studio to be a fixed space. It is wherever I live. I have always moved between several places.
“At the beginning, just after my studies, I moved to Paris while keeping a small base in Lausanne, where I regularly returned to teach. More recently, my life has unfolded between three places: Sicily, London and this studio here in Vernier.
“Each was both a living and working space. In Santo Stefano di Camastra, Sicily, I made my first ceramic works with Tindaro, working alongside local craftspeople. Sicily was my studio. In London, I was an artist in residence in one of the Landis & Gyr live-work studios, a stay that continued until the 2020 lockdown. It is this constant movement that has profoundly shaped the way I work.”
