Intersection Ora Ito

Paris, France, Oc­to­ber 2010 — Cit­roën has al­ways been con­sid­ered as the most in­no­va­tive brand of the car in­dus­try. The brand has cre­at­ed some of the most sym­bolic cars to be­come true clas­sics – as the DS for in­s­tance. The lo­go is al­so an in­sti­tu­tion. Af­ter more than 3 years of col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cit­roën on the de­vel­op­ment of ar­chi­tec­tu­ral pro­jects, Ora-ïto turned to the man­u­fac­tur­er to de­vel­op his first artis­tic pro­ject. The icon­o­clas­tic artist wasn’t dream­ing about another con­cept car but a ge­net­ic trans­for­ma­tion. An unu­su­al cre­a­tion re­u­nit­ing more than 400 years of his­to­ry, a re­flec­tion on the evo­lu­tion of the mo­bil­i­ty and the le­g­endary know-how of Cit­roën.

On the edge of the hy­poth­e­sis and the con­tem­po­rary art, this hy­brid ob­ject is based on the ful­fil­ment of a child’s dream with an ob­vi­ous com­mit­ment for the ecol­o­gy. In Ora-ïto’s vo­cab­u­lary, we find a re­al as­ser­tion ex­press­ing and re­al­iz­ing the imag­i­na­tion. This cre­a­tion be­comes by def­i­ni­tion a vi­sion in op­po­si­tion to the ag­gres­sive uni­verse of the car in­dus­try. In­spired by the first Cit­roën car and based on his de­sign­er’s com­pe­tences, Ora-ïto won­ders about the er­go­nomics of the in­te­ri­or of the first mo­bile mo­d­ule. He has worked on the codes, the DNA and the phi­lo­so­phy of this in­dus­try to mod­ern­ize it with the pos­si­bil­i­ties and the ex­ist­ing tech­nolo­gies. As­so­ci­at­ed to the re­search and in­no­va­tion de­part­ment of the dy­nas­tic Cit­roën, he has de­vel­oped a sur­pris­ing and un­ex­pect­ed sculp­ture join­ing all the pa­ram­e­ters and the tech­nolo­gies ap­pro­pri­ate for the uni­verse of car man­u­fac­tur­ers. He is al­so a part­n­er of the in­ter­na­tio­n­al fair of con­tem­po­rary art of Paris (FI­AC).
Bap­tized «Evo­mo­bil» he cre­ates a mono­typ­ic kind, which pos­sess­es on­ly sin­gle spe­cies. The term «ge­net­ic trans­for­ma­tion» is used to in­di­cate an ir­re­v­ersi­ble mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the ge­net­ic and hered­i­tary in­for­ma­tion. If the trans­for­ma­tion ar­rives up to cells then, it is passed on to the de­s­cen­dants of the mu­tant in­di­vi­d­u­al. This change can get a se­lec­tive ad­van­tage. This is the base of the pro­cess of the evo­lu­tion.
The ge­net­ic trans­for­ma­tion is a fact re­sult­ing from er­rors of copies dur­ing the cel­lu­lar di­vi­sion. When they are caused by in­ter­ven­tions, they be­come ex­treme­ly rare. The monu­men­tal sculp­ture cre­at­ed by Ora-ïto is the cross­ing of two ty­polo­gies, a ma­chine of the past and a cur­rent car, a sub­tle his­toric and so­ci­o­log­i­cal tes­ti­mony on the func­tio­n­al mo­bil­i­ty of the 16th cen­tu­ry mixed to the mod­ern world.