Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini: Art as Shared Experience

Florian Pugnaire (born 1980, lives in Nice) and David Raffini (born 1982, lives in Piedigriggio) work both individually and collaboratively, a dual practice that challenges generational categorizations. Their first joint project, Expanded Crash, is a modular installation comprising a sculpture and a documentary film. Over approximately one year, a 2CV car undergoes a slow deformation leading to compression, with the extreme slowness translating kinesthetic effects onto the vehicle and aligning the sculptural process with cinematic slow motion. The documentary component, shot entirely in Corsica, traces the project's phases and blends ethnographic and fictional narratives with a comedic tone. Their subsequent film, Casse pipe, shown at Palais de Tokyo, grafts a fictional story of a soldier doctor's desertion onto a reenactment of a Napoleonic battle in Porcia. At the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a video-performance by Raffini and a video-sculpture by Pugnaire are screened alongside. A second collaboration, Manœuvres, a 12-minute video variation on Fischli & Weiss's The Way Things Go, is completed, and a third is in progress for the Dynasty exhibition. Pugnaire's solo work includes Stunt Lab, a fight film choreographing set destruction, while Raffini's painting serves as alibi or motive for film, subject to cutting and mechanical reassembly.