Pas de trois

Dec 14, 2024 | local contemporain en

Maryvonne Arnaud, Alain Quercia and Philippe Mouillon will be in research and creation residency at the invitation of Jun Yano President of the ZUTTOSOKO Art Center, located in the province of Fukoshima in order to Question and represent soils.

Most European languages ​​retain in their structures the imprint of words of Latin origin, as many clues to ancient interpretations of the world. If these interpretations have been preserved in Western grammars over the centuries, it is obviously because they always remain active, bringing us a useful consistency to our daily perceptions and representations. This is the case for example of the word Humus, which designates the surface layer of the soil, resulting from the decomposition of organic matter, by the combined action of invertebrate animals, bacteria, fungi and by the alternation of climatic cycles. Humus designates living, fertile soils. Now the etymology of this word is common with the words Humanity, Human, Humility, which symbolically means that the soil constitutes our nourishing soil, but that it also forms the matrix of humanity, our common fund without which we cannot deploy our lives, socialize and humanize ourselves.

But this maintenance of the soils and this careful transmission from one generation to the next seems broken today. The shameless exploitation of soils and their widespread mistreatment, obviously reaches a peak in Fukushima, but it is emblematic of a suicidal, amnesiac or distracted global system, which causes the collapse of the ecosystem balances necessary for the preservation of humanity and threatens the habitability of the terrestrial. Living lands become rarer and more precious every day.

Questioning and representing soils will be our common method of approach to question and reframe our lives, to situate them in their right measure in the long time of humanization and in the tangled dynamics of the living. But our approaches will be divergent and will play at surprising each other, complementing or intertwining each other.

+2 degrees

Aug 26, 2024 | Laboratoire en

For over a decade, extremely intense fires—megafires—have been breaking out on every continent, burning larger areas each year. Their unpredictable behavior, intensity, and speed of spread make them uncontrollable. A consequence of human activity, they roam throughout all seasons, across territories that fail our imaginations, destroying all life in their path, leaving devastated landscapes and a disoriented population, torn between sadness, guilt, and anger.

Each year brings increasingly pessimistic predictions about our ability to halt this escalation.

Since 2019 Maryvonne Arnaud has been observing the consequences of climate change, notably the mega-forest fires in the Mediterranean, in Greece, on the island of Euboea and in Thrace in the Dadia-Lefkimi-Souffli park, regularly surveying these same territories in order to understand their evolution.

 

Accompanying résurgences Yves Citton (extract)

By exploring certain places on our planet, Maryvonne Arnaud reveals the past in the making—still visible, not yet crushed, not yet compacted and buried. The soils she unearths and photographs are still raw. Insolently present.

By photographing the things she finds between her feet, in traumatized places, Maryvonne Arnaud seems to have chosen a solitary adventure. No human figure in this soil journal. All that remains are frozen traces of suspended presences, fossilized existences. Footprints in the mud, deeply imprinted, which the rain fills with dirty water. Charred animal bones.

What could be more solitary than the turtle shells that mega-fires leave behind by the hundreds? What could be more threatening to our little dreams of individual sovereignty? These turtles carried their homes on their backs, believing they could go anywhere safely. All they had to do was retreat inside their fortress, close the door to any intruder, and believe themselves safe. Hence perhaps the shock felt at the sight of these charred shells littering the ground of the blackened forests of Euboea. What if these gray bones against blackened backgrounds traced on the surface of the soils of our present the traumas of our future tragedies, rather than the traces of our past lives?

These soils, cauterized by mega-fires, however, show something quite different from the desperate prospect of our future collapses. The very notion of collapse would deny the stubborn persistence with which the soils photographed by Maryvonne Arnaud surface: far from sinking into bottomless cave-ins, they resist collapse. They affirm a force that is neither obscure nor subterranean, since it brings to light that which it holds back from falling.

The solitude of these traumatized worlds actually testifies to a tireless proliferation of multitudes. (…)

memento vivere

Jun 18, 2024 | Laboratoire en

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Memento vivere is a prospective research, which will become public in the spring of 2025 in a form hybridizing contemporary creation and research in social sciences. It continues our previous work on the living and vitalities, from a new angle. Because art remains a powerful tool to reframe our lives, to situate them in their right measure in the long time of humanization and the great cycle of the living.

It can help us in particular to admit how much the generations gone by compose our matrix, how much we still lead our lives, accompanied by their words and with their tools. This is how they socialize us and humanize us. No civilization would exist without this transmission of words and knowledge, symbols and tools.

There is nothing necrophiliac in this research but, at the time of the Anthropocene and the collapse of ecosystem balances, the desire to question and reframe our lives, to situate them in their proper measure in the long time of humanization and in the tangled dynamics of the living.

> Opus 01 : Les Présences

The first public production will take place near the two mass graves of the Petit-Sablon cemetery, in the commune of La Tronche, which welcome anonymous people, the destitute, those without known families and irreducible personalities who chose to be buried here out of pure conviction, thus defying the social order for eternity. It will be called Les Présences.

Philippe Mouillon takes up the vocabulary of photographic portraits reproduced on porcelain, present in many cemeteries, where they bear witness to the social and family order of other eras. We thus leaf through an entire social ecosystem, a mille-feuille of extinguished presences that obviously affect us. Because despite the alignments, an apparently immutable order, cemeteries are places of disorder, emotional disorder of course, but even more abysmal rout in the face of the evidence of our insignificance. At work everywhere and for everyone, wealthy or destitute, the irresistible silent dissolution of what was once a life in the impalpable.

In a few decades, these portraits become so eroded by the cycles of bad weather and the corrosive power of the sun’s rays that they become illegible. They seem erased by the excess of light or eaten away by humidity and micro-organisms. The chemical texture decomposes into an exhausted, sometimes absurd or extravagant colorization. Individualities thus dissolve and slowly fade away, which is all the more disturbing since the photograph obviously attests that this existence was nevertheless lived, with its ordinary daily life of joys and sorrows, its passions and its dramas. But by dissolving, these images no longer preserve the trace of a singular existence but nevertheless bear witness to a presence.

It is this anonymity of individualities dissolved in a common humanity that will be amplified here, in a vast book of porcelains that will detach us from the continuum of daily life to evoke a deeper present where presences survive.

copyright Philippe Mouillon (2014)

> Opus 02 :

Other artists will be invited to intervene over the months in the cemeteries of the Grenoble metropolitan area. The first artist in residence will be Rachid Koraichi. In addition to a Garden of Memory created as part of the Chaumont Garden Festival, Rachid has notably taken the initiative of designing Garden of Africa on the edge of the Mediterranean in order to welcome the bodies of migrants who disappeared at sea and thus ensure that they have a memory worthy of being mourned.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture (Drac Auvergne Rhône-Alpes), the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region – within the framework of the 21st Century Memories calls for projects, the Department of Isère, the City of La Tronche

Reclaim public space now !

May 5, 2022 | local contemporain en, RECHERCHE / PUBLICATIONS

While the Ukrainian resistance overthrows in kyiv the statue dedicated to the friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, Romanian artists and intellectuals are wondering how to radically renew the artistic presence in the public space of Bucharest.

 

Here as elsewhere, the steamroller of the market imaginary dominates the public space, but the city is a complex palimpsest composed by Byzantine then Orthodox imaginaries, Austro-Hungarian then Soviet occupations, the frequency of earthquakes, the state of abandonment of buildings whose owners disappeared during the disasters of the 20th century, and today by the unbridled Eldorado of the globalized economy.

 

In this context, what legitimacy to rely on? How to take in charge without waiting? How to regenerate public space by opening it up to cross-cutting initiatives? How to share the differences of interpretation of the world? How to contribute to the autonomy of individuals? How to revive? How to welcome dissident thoughts, poetics, social innovations?

 

The initiative led by Edmond Niculusca (ARCEN) and supported by the French Institute of Bucharest brings together artists Pisica Patrata, Dan Perjovschi, Cristian Neagoe, architect-urban planner Monica Sebestyen and former Minister of Culture Corina Suteu, expert international in innovative cultural policies.

The work of the place

Mar 29, 2022 | local contemporain en

  • multitudes – philosophical artistic political review, publishes this spring 2022 its number 86 entitled The territory, a political affair
  • Territory! The word flaps like a flag, it is adored or suspected. What about this political object? This issue attempts to objectify it, to extract it from categorisations to show its diversity, its interdependencies, its historical depth, its resources. “The spirit of the place” inspires the artist, defines the environments to be preserved, permeates our affects. We all experience “the appalling sweetness of belonging”.
  • In response to this invitation, Philippe Mouillon develops in this issue the idea that the work of the place is simply the work of a smuggler who facilitates resurgences of time and their social acclimatization:

“The poet, the artist, the gardener or the architect (and so many others, inhabited by deep times) can work on a place by carefully assembling a certain quality of air, lights, prevailing winds, by dosing the mineralities, by synchronizing the encounter between individuals, an era, temporalities and the entanglement of terrestrial ecosystems… in order to crystallize a mood, an impalpable atmosphere, a particular intensity that carries us and invites us to live.

From one site to another, but also from one era to another of human societies, from one stage to another of our own existence, places form the matrix of our sensitivity and our behavior. They are places rather than nothing in that they soothe us, console us, consolidate us, bring us together, connect us, grow us. They are part of a break with the simplified uniform of territorial abstraction to open in us a decanted present of the moment, where presences and absences remain, endlessly intertwined”.