Incomplete chronology of skateboarding. 1779-2009

For an artist like Raphaël Zarka, skateboarding is above all a matter of forms. Forms of rest, forms of movement, they silently run through the history of art and science, from Galileo to Robert Morris. The urban architecture, but also the modules of the skateparks, strangely echo them. As for the practice of skateboarding, as shown in La Conjonction Interdit (2003), it always comes down to operating a kind of “montage” among the diversity of materials and forms offered by the city, by energizing or destabilizing the structures designed to rest and comfort, to the point of reversing their functions and meaning. Raphaël Zarka's essays are thus part of a kind of fantastic archeology; they extend in their own way his work of sculpture and photography. The “lacunary” chronology presented in A Day Without a Wave offers a sober, and even laconic – although extremely informed – reading of a story that was generally treated in hagiographic mode by early skateboarders, “old combatants” reconverted to journalism or sociology. It makes all the more sensitive the lines of force that cross the practice of skateboarding and link it to a whole section of contemporary thinking on the transmigration of forms and uses. Elie During