We Were Giants

Scale

There is a largeness that belongs to childhood - when a cardboard box is a fortress and a staircase a mountain, and the world feels like something you can rearrange. Growing up is largely learning to shrink: to treat rooms, objects, and streets as fixed, correct, and none of your business. WE WERE GIANTS proposes recovering that earlier sense of scale, not as nostalgia but as method - to feel large again is to remember that a street was designed and could have been otherwise.

Encounter

The exhibition places two works into the open, with nothing to hold a body at a distance. Valentin Guillon's runs underfoot and along its windows: a painted circuit that climbs the walls and crosses the ground, so that simply walking the street places you within the work. Valentine Gardiennet's answers from the opposite direction - a group of giant figures built to be sat beside, where up close you become the small thing, dwarfed by shapes assembled from the very materials most people step over without seeing.

Salvage

Gardiennet's giants are made largely from what the street discards - salvage, packaging, things pulled back from the bin - and then given back to it: brought out each morning to a slightly different spot, leaned on, lived alongside, and left to weather. Closer to graffiti than to monument, they are claimed rather than installed, and their wearing down is not a failure but the point. This is what a design week can do - change how a street is organised and hold that position just long enough to make us feel like it could change this way forever.