Banc Public

There are a number of park benches in Henry Allards park, but one of them really stands out. It is the French sculptor Lilian Bourgeat’s sculpture Banc Public. This bench is two and a half times larger than other park benches of the same model. And at the same time, it makes you two and a half times smaller than what you would normally be in relation to a park bench. “Curiouser and curiouser”, Alice in Wonderland might have said.

Bourgeat works consistently with enlarged versions of everyday objects. Commonplace things and situations suddenly seem unfamiliar and strange when your perspective changes. How does it feel for you to sit on the bench?

“Banc public” is French for park bench, but a more literal translation might be “public bank”. The artwork can be seen as a commentary on the public space and who is allowed to occupy it. Who is the public space for and what is given space in public art? One way to interpret the work is to see it as a monument to the place of the public and “the little people” in these contexts.

Within close distance, at Järntorget, the statute of Karl XIV Johan rises up over its audience from the pedestal on which it has stood for more than a century. Bourgeat’s bench is made in approximately the same scale, yet his work doesn’t revere select sovereigns, but rather us – the public. The bench is there for us to interact with, and if we sit on it, we find ourselves at the physical centre of the artwork. The sculpture can thus be seen as a call for us all to use our shared physical space and make it our own.

Lilian Bourgeat was born in 1970 in Saint-Claude, France. He lives and works in Dijon. Banc Public was installed in Örebro during OpenArt 2015 and was subsequently purchased as a permanent artwork.