Actions-Peu consists of a series of eight short sequences, during which Boris Achour films his interventions in urban space. He uses an element or configuration of urban furniture (a pole, an electrical utilities box, the entrance to a ventilation shaft, the alignment of flower pots…), which he modifies by adding an unusual material or by disturbing the established balance.

Some of the sequences make a formal link between elements that are similar in colour or material. In the first sequence, Boris Achour applies an entire loaf of gingerbread to the base of an electricity pole and, in the seventh, he places three mouthfuls of chocolate on top of an electrical utilities box in the street.

He also acts by disturbing a given perspective. In the fourth sequence, he breaks the alignment of a series of flowerpots and, in the sixth, he puts a chair in the middle of a bridge surrounded by fly-overs and by-pass roads.

The last three sequences focus as much on matters of safety (a ball of adhesive tape wound round an iron bar protruding from a block of concrete) as on an ironic view of urban sculpture (a series of brightly coloured plastic bags tied to a ventilation outlet).

Boris Achour shows an amused distance in relation to the proposed and imposed codes of urbanism that control the movement of bodies in public spaces and direct peoples eyes to what they are meant to see.

The tape's title refers to performance, but infers a reduction of gesture. Actions-peu is in phase with Boris Achour's clear-thinking conscience concerning the status of the contemporary artist – neither keeper of a mysterious truth, nor visionary. In the same register, he produces a leaflet like the ones handed out by faith healers at subway stations, which carries the message: "Boris Achour can't do anything for you", an observation on his prospective impotence.

The action carried out is distinguished by its brevity and ephemeral nature: as soon as it's done, it's recorded. Video is the most appropriate medium for relating the action, where the final result simply disappears. The persistence of these actions in the public field has no importance; they are in no way a potential embellishment or an attempt to enhance the value of anything.

The perspicacity of his actions reveals itself in the tradition of "witz" – wit or 'bon mot' in German – where the only difference is that Boris Achour doesn't use words but a new organisation of visual signs.

Together, these sequences act as suite, which could be continued as much as one wants. Actions-peu doesn't present as much a finished system as a method employed for interventions – inherited from situationist postulates and urban decay.

In 1996, Boris Achour made L'Aligneur de pigeons, an assembly of two photographs, presented as a method for making an "action-peu". Simple and playful in appearance, this scenic presentation of birds in the before (a whole jumble of pigeons) and after modes (the pigeons lined up along a feeding trough) offers the well-informed spectator a prestigious background: on the one hand, the Palais-Royal, a classical building where the alignment symbolises order and perfection, and, on the other hand, Les Deux Plateaux by Daniel Buren, a work that is symptomatic of a policy of public commissions where artistic intervention is synonymous with aesthetic added-value.

Laetitia Rouiller