The Survey Project 1: The 20 Most Liveable Cities, by Lili Phelouzat

“In today’s world, it seems that everything needs to be analyzed, researched, benchmarked and marketed to an extreme extent. Keeping that in mind, I decided to start looking at surveys. The first one I encountered was entitled “The 20 Most Liveable Cities In 2012” by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Melbourne came first followed by Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Adelaide, Sydney, Helsinki, Perth, Auckland, Zurich, Geneva, Osaka, Stockholm, Hamburg, Montreal, Paris, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and finally Brisbane. This list was made according to 30 indicators assigned across 5 broad categories: stability, healthcare, culture & environment, education and infrastructure. Unfortunately London came at rank 55...
I thought: ‘’OK that’s a start!!’’

I also wanted to present my work in a different way, and I thought, hold on a second, if you can buy shares of a company, why not buy a share of my artwork? So 20 cities = 1 artwork, oh no, 20 cities x 1 artwork = 20 pieces = 1 artwork to share.
Having all those elements in mind, I started working on it. So which is the best way of advertising those 20 most liveable cities? I thought billboards, as billboards are everywhere. They are called banners on the internet, the internet being the place where most of us spend the most of our time. Hmm…internet, the “matrix”…a starting point for that billboard which becomes recurrent in the next 19 artworks.
I’m taking the billboard and the 20 most liveable cities in a journey between the internet, the abstract and the real. The overpopulated, the illusion, the no man’s land, no matter where you are, there is always a billboard to remind you what you should eat, what you should think, where you should be!

Lili Phelouzat is a French artist based in London. After spending 2012 curating and coordinating “Project 2012 exhibition”, in 2013 she has been focusing on her own art and was selected for Art Below, March edition and Cold Climate at Occupy My Time gallery. “The Survey Project, 1: The 20 Most Liveable Cities’’ is the first exhibition of a coming series.