On location in Digne-les-bains since 11 October 2021
Artist, lithophile and amateur vulcanologist, Ilana Halperin reminds us that mineral matter is not condemned to leave us unmoved. Porous, intimately linked to our physical and temporal scale, it runs through our culture and our human, if not "earthly", representations, as an inescapable marker of our identity: who are we? where are we from? how do we show it?
By combining personal accounts and scientific discourse, the artist reveals numerous cognitive, affective and plastic intersectionalities that make the "inert" an outdated concept. Architecture, archaeology, crafts, images or certain forms of rituals from everyday life testify, thanks to a polyphony subtly staged by the artist, to the co-construction between man and his environment.
Les œu
Ilana Halperin's work has been exhibited in more than 15 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Iceland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, China and more recently Turkey.
Several articles have been published recently, notably in the online magazines Frieze Magasine and Artsy.net.
During her first residency, Ilana Halperin studies the unique geological formations of the UNESCO Geopark of Haute Provence and meets the women and men who still practice and transmit the traditional skills and crafts of the region.
With the expertise of scientists and inhabitants, the artist created a series of works "crystallising" this relationship between nature, landscape and humans, through sculptures and stories.
Elle s’appuie notamment She relies in particular on the singularity of remarkable sites, such as the petrifying aquifer spring of the Parc Saint-Benoît, so dear to the people of Dignan, as a potential focus for new fictions.
photos credits: idbl art school / Claude Rocher and the artist Anaïs Tondeur
ÊTRES EXPOSÉS
16 SEPTEMBER > 23 OCTOBER 2021
"As part of the programme celebrating the anniversary of the Cairn, the IDBL (Digne's intercommunal art school) has invited the young artist Anaïs Tondeur to present her work at the BILD (Bureau d'Implantation des Lignes de Digne). As a counterpoint to the retrospective exhibition Flash-back, a brief history of the Cairn, this joint invitation is part of a prospective dimension dear to both structures.
For many years, the idbl and the Cairn have maintained a special relationship (inviting artists to workshops with students of the preparatory class, visiting exhibitions with students and free auditors, meetings and conferences with invited artists, etc.) which favours the transmission and exchange of contemporary artistic practices: a precious agreement that we wished to reaffirm through this exhibition.
Indeed, the invitation extended to Anaïs Tondeur points to common interests: to study the role that artistic creation can play in contemporary society and the way in which it can and must today oblige us to take an interest in subjects from which we can no longer turn away; to explore approaches that offer antidotes for apprehending an increasingly damaged world, to exhibit transversal and curious practices that take a close interest in the relationships, environments and conditions of existence of all living beings; to attempt, finally, to share and transmit proposals likely to initiate transformative encounters that favour reconfigurations.
Anaïs Tondeur's approach, as outlined in the exhibition Êtres exposés, echoes these common concerns. Here, a series of voices and entities murmur, which, if we are willing to listen and look carefully, give rise to a multitude of worlds, temporalities and stories: that of the occupants of the Lejuc wood near Bure, resisting the pollution of their soil and the mortifying forces colonizing the underground zones through the burial of nuclear waste (Vigiles); that of the particles of carbon black, invisible but companion species, which now populate bodies and air, thus blurring the nature/culture polarization (Noir de Carbone); that of the irradiated plants of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, bearing witness to the disaster as much as to the powers of terrestrial resurgence, and of which the artist has collected a radiographed specimen every year since the explosion (Chernobyl Herbarium); that of the San Andreas fault, the meeting line between the Pacific and American plates, inhabited for the duration of an expedition into the bowels of the earth, from which the artist brings back real fragments and sound reconstructions (Dérives).
The apparent heterogeneity of these "subjects" could at first be surprising, but the common thread of the exhibition and, more broadly, of Anaïs Tondeur's approach soon becomes apparent: her art infiltrates the invisible and, a priori a risky proposition, takes hold of the medium most literally in contact with our ability to see: photography. It is at the heart of this ambiguity that Anaïs Tondeur's images nestle. Between oscillation and equilibrium, her works explore, thwart and reformulate the tenuous limits that are exercised in the distribution between visible and invisible.
[…]
If the "subjects" explored by Anaïs Tondeur (zadists, plants, rocks, air, water…) are now beginning to enter politics, it should be noted that they have long been underexposed, even invisibilised. This is a strange paradox because, in many ways, their overexposure (to militarised forces, to radiation, to the Anthropocene era and the new climate regime, etc.) remains central.
By rehabilitating these "exposed beings", Anaïs Tondeur's art opposes anthropocentric narratives with an attention to "ephemeral and circumscribed flows that affect not only humans but the heterogeneous whole of our relationships. "
Extract from the commentary on the exhibition "Beings Exposed - Anaïs Tondeur" by Julie Michel
Anaïs Tondeur is a French artist based in Paris. She creates narratives and speculative investigations through which she experiments with other relationships to the world, different modes of cohabitation with non-humans: plants, rocks, air, water. To this end, she develops a renewal of our modes of perception, and explores, beyond the separation of nature and culture, ways of disrupting the grand narrative of the Anthropocene. In collaboration with geologists, oceanographers, physicists, philosophers and anthropologists, her research protocols have led her on expeditions in the tracks of black carbon particles, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, across the Atlantic Ocean or along the borders that separate the great tectonic plates. She has presented her work in international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (France), Spencer Museum of Modern Art (USA) or Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul).
During the week of July 18, 2021, the Cairn welcomed (at last!) the American artist & biologist Brandon Ballengée for a first approach in the Dignois context: exploration of sites, meetings with entomologists of the region and night observation where we had the joy of apprehending a beautiful diversity of moths…
Thanks to the association Proserpine Paca for the organisation of the observation evening in the Saint-Benoît park!
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See you soon…
To find out more about the artist's approach, click here :
Andy Goldsworthy. Poppy spits. Digne-les-Bains, France. 10 June 2015 (Projection de coquelicots.Digne-les-bAINS, France.10 JUIN 2015) © Andy Goldsworthy
Antoine Boudin. Poster for the exhibition Flash Back, A brief history of the Cairn © Antoine Boudin
A brief history of Cairn
The Flash-Back exhibition, whose scenography is in keeping with a desire for sobriety and respect for nature that is dear to the project, retraces the different stages in the history of the Cairn, a veritable "artistic laboratory in the mountains" that was a pioneer in France and Europe in terms of the size of the space involved. This retrospective is based on the Cairn's archives and on a selection of works lent by the artists. For more than a year, the video artist Jean-Baptiste Warluzel, during numerous stays to which he was invited, produced a work for this exhibition: Second Plan.
Curator : Nadine Gomez-Passamar
Laetitia JEURISSEN & Fabrizio TERRANOVA
laureates of the 2020 call for applications
Laetitia Jeurissen (b. 1989, Belgium) is an artist and curator who lives and works in Mexico City. Her interests in feminism and postcolonial studies in particular, as well as her desire to create networks of affinities and collaborations in the world of contemporary art between different disciplines have led her to organize several projects. She is co-founder of Aztlan in 2015, a platform for interdisciplinary research and conferences. In 2016, Laetitia Jeurissen founded Squash Editions, a series of curatorial proposals that take place on a Squash court in Mexico City. She has created several publications, organized exhibitions and worked in the field of archives for renowned galleries and art collections. She has won several grants and awards for her projects (Flemish Government grant, Mexican government grant for foreign artists, Beca Adidas Border and P.A.C.). In her artistic practice, she works mainly in the field of video and photography. She is currently developing Octopi, a quarterly magazine focusing on the practices of care and re-enchantment, the first issue is planned for the summer of 2020.
Fabrizio Terranova (b. 1971, Italy) lives and works in Brussels. He is an artist, filmmaker, activist, and professor at ERG (School of Graphic Research) in Brussels where he initiated and co-directs the Master's Degree in Storytelling and Experimentation/Speculative Narrative. He is best known for his film Donna Haraway, Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016), which has been internationally distributed (Anthology Film Archives - New York, KunstenFestivaldesArts - Brussels, Tate Modern - London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). He has published Les Enfants du compost in the collective book Gestes spéculatifs (Les Presses du réel, 2015) and Pour un film chien in the collective book Habiter le trouble with Donna Haraway (Editions du Dehors, 2019). He is also a founding member, with Vinciane Despret, Emilie Hermant, Isabelle Stengers of DingDingDong - Institute for the co-production of knowledge on Huntington's disease for which he recently directed Absolute Beginners (2019, IFFR, International Film Festival - Rotterdam, DOK - Leipzig). His first film, Josée Andrei, An Insane Portrait (2010) was followed by a book published by Éditions du souffle.
A monster with two heads
The project will be the first collaboration between filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova and curator Laetitia Jeurissen, born of their interest and love for feminist science fiction, speculative fabulation and a pointillist and energetic art of portraiture of characters and situations on the margins. A conviction of the formal and sensitive necessities of any political commitment. The starting point for this collaboration is a shared passion for the relevance of Butler's Parables. The desire to transform a science-fiction book into a film-investigation, for which the territory and context of Digne-les-Bains will open up as a possible scenography, a place of mutation for the future imagined by Octavia Butler*.
A free adaptation, a film-investigation / Border territories and refuges / Digne-les-Bains - refuge zone / A collective methodology / An experimental restitution.
The Parable of the Trickster ** is the title given by Octavia Butler * to the third volume - never published - of the science-fiction trilogy of Parables. The first two volumes (Parable of the Sower, Parable of Talent) tell the story of Lauren Olamina, a 16-year-old African-American teenager trying to survive in a near future devastated by the consequences of capitalism and its corollary, global warming. The forced migration of Lauren and the inhabitants of her Californian home village to the North of the United States, where the promise of a more sustainable life encourages them to make this dangerous journey, is recorded in a diary, which is at the same time the collection of a philosophical-spiritual thought called "Earth-seed", convinced that humans need other kinds of stories and thoughts to ensure life on earth.
Our project proposes the free adaptation of this third mysterious part of the African-American feminist writer in the form of a documentary in three chapters and a restitution of the research work. This film-investigation will be carried out on three border territories of the globe: Digne-les-Bains, the border between Mexico and the United States, and Turkey.
Three frontier places, three singular stories, three cultures, three refuge areas on which to articulate fragments of a singular reality and fabulations from a work of fiction that takes into account the urgency of composing in a world in profound change. Pieces of the world traversed by transformations, migratory flows of all kinds and all species, but also refuge zones in order to reinvent a liveable world.
* Octavia Butler, born in Pasadena in 1947, long considered one of the best known women in the field of science fiction, Octavia E. Butler became famous in 1979 with Kindred, the story of a young girl who travels through time and meets her slave ancestors. Winner of the 1984 and 1985 Hugo Prize in the short story category and the 1994 Nebula Prize for The Parable of Talent, as well as the prestigious MacArthur Grant "Genius" award, she is the first science fiction writer to receive this distinction. Octavia E. Butler passed away in 2006 in Seattle at the age of 59.
** The figure of the "Trickster" or the Coyote, coming from Native American cultures, is a troublemaker, a kind of complement to the civilized or conformist individual, devil's advocate. He is a figure of "non-innocence", he "seems to force problems to unfold, to explore unexpected and imperceptible folds, to create discomfort without however paralysing action and thought" as the philosopher Vinciane Despret describes it to us.
Text extracted from the note of intent by Laetitia Jeurissen & Fabrizio Terranova
On September 25th and 26th
The hiking festival will take place with the theme of Routo and pastoralism!
On September 25th with the Cairn…
What could be better than to take you on a journey in the footsteps of Marcel?
The Sentier Marcel is a work by Till Roeskens. It consists of the installation of a series of fragments of Marcel's story (a former shepherd from the Haute Bléone) along a route that he followed all his life, thus allowing you to follow a life path and a mountain path at the same time.
You can find snippets of Till Roeskens' work in the visual chronology of the 'Flash-Back' exhibition!
The event brochure can be found here: https://fr.calameo.com/read/000943070b06b34ee66b4
Registration and information at the Provence Alpes Digne-les-Bains Tourist Office
This alignment of seventy-seven heavy oak beams installed in the valley between two mountain peaks of Cousson. The artwork is itself the “col”, the passage between those separate places. Nonas emphasizes the power of an intermediary space between the peaks, the gap that opens the way to a new reality.
His use of simple shapes and materials, set in the continuity of that expansive mountain space, brings us back to the essence of the place itself. The artwork, echos the scale of the mountain. Nonas isn’t interested
in his objects as such, but rather in what they are able to provoke through their interaction with their environment.
The potentially infinite repetition of its wooden units moves us through and along them, evoking the invisible connections that link our own mountain stories and beliefs to the past and present inhabitants of these mountains and the complex lives they have lived there.
The choice of this particular place increases that symbolic evocation. Cousson is the mountain towering over the town of Digne-les-Bains, where is located Samten Dzong (Reflection Residence in Tibetan), the home of the writer and explorer Alexandra David-Neel. Her deep lifelong spiritual quest was itself linked to the grandure, the power and the silence of the mountain lands.
(c)Richard Nonas
8h Meeting for trekking depart: Gassendi high school (Digne-les-Bains). 3 hours walking, intermediate level
or
9h Meeting for trekking depart: Entrages village. 2 hours walking, intermediate level
à 12h Pic-nic at Cousson mountain.
[Skilled walker, get hiking shoes and 2 litres of water per person. Picnic backpack.]
In attendance of the artist.
Evoking this outdoor sculpture, Richard Nonas stretches his oak-wood line down the length of the large landscape paintings room of Gassendi Museum: Col of the half-opened door (2019).
Opening Friday 12 July, 18h
For more informations : www.musee-gassendi.org
(c) Jean-Baptiste Warluzel
This project was supported by : Ministry of Culture (Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Service des arts plastiques), Digne-les-Bains municipality.
The artwork Col of the second day is offered by Richard Nonas and Fergus McCaffrey gallery to Gassendi Museum.
Her installation was supported by the Ministry of Culture, within the frame of the action « Le musée sort de ses murs - 2018 ».
Gassendi Museum and Cairn art center would like to thank : Valentine De Badereau De Saint-Martin for Fergus McCaffrey Gallery (New York); Denis Boudin, Pierre Lagier, Anthony Mayenc, Sebastien Bailly, Guillaume Payan - Provence Alpes Agglomération; Celebration Service of Digne-les-Bains municipality; Yvan Théaudin, Pierre Paillat, Luc Richard - Art en chemin association - Jean-Claude Magaud, participating to the artwork production ; Entrages municipality, l’Office National des Forêts and Stéphane Beridon (GAEC béridon) for authorisations ; Jean-Baptiste Warluzel for the video about the project.
Have been participated to the production : Eric Klein - coordinator ; hélisaF enterprise.