Feb 19, 2012 | Laboratoire en
The village church in Péage de Roussillon overlooks the Rhone valley for centuries. A place with powerful memories, it is anchored in identities shared by everybody, whose symbolic function is however no longer questioned by the test of everyday life.
This church was stormed by Maryvonne Arnaud in 1987: standing on a high-lift truck parked a few meters away from the church frontage, she has for a few hours taken a comprehensive set of detailed shots. 110 images, approximately one metre square, taken from the front without vanishing lines, which recreated the whole façade.
But the rigour of this systematic shooting does not hide the weaknesses of the photographer, on the contrary it shows some loss of details, some spatial inconsistencies, and brings out the physical challenge of this long commitment.
These fragments are then reproduced full scale, then put together on a network of cables strung across the front of the building.
Far from recreating the original façade, the monumental work re-composes it in another spatial and temporal dimension: each puff of wind makes the 150 square meters of this façade of sensitive paper flutter in the wind and escape from gravity towards to live a new life with baroque hues!
Three years in a row, and in three different cities of the Rhône Valley, including Arles during the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Maryvonne Arnaud systematically shoots the façade of a particular building, before delivering it to the Mistral wind.
Feb 16, 2012 | local contemporain en
« local.contemporain » is a centre of research and original artistic initiatives around contemporary urban territories, an enterprise to renew our look, with a particular care for emerging forms and experiences.
« local.contemporain » examines, in the usual local habits , the innovative particularities or the ones that resist to the global mutations of our societies.
This strategy of hyper-localised questioning is developed with a particular care for the global scale of mutations and for the abundant complexity of the involved temporalities. That is why artists and researchers coming from all over the world are associated to this initiative, looking for numerous urban tools to think about this territory.
We publish an 80-page review distributed in bookstores by Harmonia-Mundi.
Nine issues are published to date: 01> you are here focused on the contemporary realities of ordinary urban forms, 02> It’s Sunday! devoted to the analysis of free time in a so-called “leisure” society, 03> invisible city analyzes sensitive urban forms, those which escape the domination of the eye but structure our perceptions, 04> the precarious, contemporary questions, on the precariousness of our lives as a new dominant form, 05> Crowds centered on the experience of the crowd, alternately worrying or intelligent, 06> Points of reference, around the feeling of disorientation of a growing share of the population , 07> a world of its own or how each one builds its own landmarks in a globalized horizon, 08> collection of collections about the place of privacy in the public space, 09> singular landscapes, pluralistic landscape to approach the Landscape as a resource within reach of all, and live with scope.
> We produce interventions of urban scales in the real space of the city, in order to shape these representations for the man of the street. They invite the participation of hundreds of contributors.
Thus It is Sunday, a random collection of photographs:
> We develop pedagogical tools for teachers from kindergarten to university.
Thus cartographic games:
Visit the site local.contemporain
