Radeau de Sauvetage" (2013) as part of the TRAIN PROJECT

Radeau de Sauvetage is both performance and prototype for a sailing raft that rides on rail tracks. It is part of the Train Project, a series of rail art vehicles, which were deployed on railway tracks around the world, frome Tapis Volant in Istanbul (2005), to The H-Line in New York (2007), and Metronome in Paris (2012). These site specific vehicles use abandoned rail tracks as an open air laboratory for art and transport experiments. The Train Project piggy-backs on abandoned infrastructure, using leftovers from the centralised machine ensemble of rail transport of a bygone era. The dream is to go beyond art and become a public transport service. How can we think as artists about something so complex as a public transport system, including its infrastructure, vehicles, tickets, passengers and its effect on the environment? What could public transport mean in times when it gets privatised? The Train Project aims to operate a permanent passenger railway service called Metronome, running between two stations on the Petite Ceinture, the mythic, circular, abandoned rail track encircling the Paris city, where the project began in 2003.

Biography

Founded in Paris by Helen Evans (GB/1972) and Heiko Hansen (DE/1970), HeHe is an artists duo whose work aims to rethink the existing technological systems that surround us, to give them a new social and critical usage. HeHe reinvest with humour technological infrastructures with their installations on transportation (Train Project) and pollution (Champs d’Ozone). Their work has been exhibited at Lyon Biennale (2009); Centre Georges Pompidou (2004, 2006, 2007); FACT Liverpool (2013). HeHe is represented by Aeroplastics Contemporary in Bruxelles.