Narmine Sadeg

People and Things is built with drawings that, some small exceptions notwithstanding, all come from databases of invention patents which are currently obsolete and in the public domain. These databases of several million inventions are accessible on the Google patents site. For several years I have been browsing with great curiosity a huge number of these patents, which very often contain drawings. I was more particularly interested in those representing human figures and made up a personal archive with them. Produced in very different periods, these drawings, none of which have artistic purposes, show how an invention, often an object, functions. It always seemed to me that through this characteristic each figure belonged to a story, like characters in an absent novel.

People and Things offers various combinations of these characters as well as these invented objects, together with words and sentences describing them. The work is a dynamic setting that establishes virtually endless correlations between them, in order to construct an upcoming fiction. In theory, there are over 95 trillion possible situations.