For their public-space projects, Sylvie Boisseau and Frank Westermeyer choose their intervention locations very carefully and sensitively. They do this with a sense for incongruous gestures, unusual experiences and possible fictions. 

Their Intervention Drive-In Meeting Area lies on the commuter axis between Geneva (Switzerland) and Annemasse (France) and addresses the question of passage and migration: For some this location is a home. For others – the border-crossers and commuters – this is a place of passage, a non-place. The artistic intervention intercedes into an existing café. It consists of a light box and a designated parking place that inserts itself like a wedge through the hedge into the café’s terrace. A marking indicates the new function: the rules of the game are given. 

Two worlds, two players stand opposite each other in this café, which is appropriately called “Au Relais”. Originally Relais were transfer stations at which fresh horses could be exchanged for tired horses in regular intervals (in an expanded sense this is also the function of the rest area on the highway – to rest, to tank up on power). Relais also means “relay” – or a distance between two points in a given space (an “in between”). To take the baton from someone, to serve as the mediator – isn’t this the role that the two artists are taking on? They create a location of encounter: a stage set (the table and chairs are slightly raised, as if on a stage) for an exchange between two protagonists who neither know nor relate to each other – the local and the commuter, the pedestrian and the driver. In this intervention, the original sense of a “drive-in” is set on its head: the drive-in was invented to offer the possibility to consume quickly without having to leave your car. Here, Sylvie Boisseau and Frank Westermeyer exchange values and promote a possible communication of stories and anecdotes between individuals who are not connected at all, with the means of an intervention that is light (in the sense of simplicity in installing) as well as critical and humorous. 

The public space is a space of unexpected coincidences, experimentation. It is open to interventions that are purposely more ephemeral than in an ephemeral location, the café that is slated to be ripped down soon.  – Claire de Ribeaupierre