The IAC and URDLA along with their teams are proposing a new project in Villeurbanne intended to be renewed every two years: La Fabrique du Nous, an invitation to creation and encounter on the scale of the city. How can we learn together to create connections with shared art?
In this spirit of openness and outreach to the inhabitants of Villeurbanne, IAC and URDLA will extend their activities into the street by multiplying artistic encounters based on exhibitions they host. From URDLA to IAC by way of the Ferme des artisans, the artists will propose shared moments in the form of rituals, walks, dance, readings and workshops...
La Fabrique du Nous, is also a school established by the Brain space laboratory for the purposes of experimenting with other models of relationships based on the sensitive experience that art offers. The objective here is also to discover the intersecting research done by artists and scientists with the potential to question our vision of the world for the purposes of transforming ourselves.
For its first edition, La Fabrique du Nous has chosen to build upon ritual practices driven mainly by female artists for the power of the connections that they generate. Originally intended to open last Spring, a Spring that was lost to us, it will now take place in the Autumn. Representing even more of a challenge in this time of social distancing, La Fabrique du Nous emerges as a deep breath of fresh air.
By celebrating the winter solstice, the artists invite us to prepare Spring of next year and a renewal: learning together to craft Us, is necessary, now more than ever.
The IAC & URDLA teams
The ritual, like art, inaugurates and repeats a series of codified acts and words. Religious, magical or daily, of passage, purification or bewitchment, it is located between being and doing, between gesture and speech. Symbolic in nature, the ritual creates the conditions for the repeated emergence of related communities, and of Us, at the heart of this project.
The winter period that welcomes the exhibition invites torpor and retreat – similar to what a certain number of us experienced during lockdown – this moment of latency can
also be a time of preparation: don’t the days get longer the day after the winter solstice? In this regenerative period of waiting and expectation, ancient or newer rituals are potential processes of transformation that can renew the stories we tell and outline a different relationship with our surroundings.
This exhibition, the result of the efforts of a whole team, weaves together work done by historically renowned artists such as Lygia Pape, Gina Pane and Adrian Piper, selected from the collection of the IAC and other public collections, with work done by guest artists, including participants from Brain space laboratory. By linking these works done by female artists from different generations, Rituel·le·s wishes to consider the individual and collective as a whole and to place common experience at the heart of its activity.
Rituel·le·s draws its power from ecofeminism, a militant movement that emerged in the United States in the 1980's and that combines ecology with feminism in peaceful and creative actions. It resulted from debates that continue to echo widely today, with ecofeminist thought aiming to deconstruct the concept of nature while pointing out the joint domination exercised over both nature and women. The latter struggle to reappropriate their bodies and their relationship with the Earth and the rest of the living world, notably through the intermediary of sororal rituals1. The exhibition is nourished by this “art of transformation of self and the world”2 attaching the concept of ritual to the feminine.
Polysemic and protean, the ritual deploys a strong performative and aesthetic dimension where the staging of bodies is decisive. Many female artists quite rightly approach their performances as potential rituals, opportunities to outline their place – our place – within the living world through the intermediary of gestures, objects, moments of shared spirituality, incantations and ceremonies; so many alternative ways to revive collective emancipation, again.
A tribute to all women, predominant in essential services during the recent health crisis, agents of rituals of care.
—
1 Sorority is a concept equivalent to that of fraternity that describes the principal of solidarity and community among women.
2 Émilie Hache, preface to Starhawk, Rêver l’obscur. Femmes, magie et politique, Paris, Éditions Cambourakis, 2015, p.12.
At URDLA, Maïté Marra questions the singular fabric of an “us” that borders on a courtship ritual, taking Cary Grant, a figure created by Hollywood cinema, as its starting point.
The proposition unfolds in two stages, firstly with the presentation of Monument 600 dpi, an immersive installation made up of ten screens that randomly project sixty films. A scanner, that turns on to capture an image with a resolution of 600 dpi, is the only light that shines in these intimate, everyday spaces. It functions like a cinema machine that mechanically determines for how long the images appear, while lighting the spaces and sculpting faces and unmoving bodies out of moving shadows.
Monument 600 dpi will then fade from view to make way for DURGENCE LAMOUR and the figure of Cary Grant, and more specifically his ambiguous performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The box of matches, inscribed with the initials of the character Roger O. Thornhill, ROT, is, in his hand, the primary object of the ritual’s beginning. As for Eve Kendall, she joins the dance with the phrase: “I never discuss love on an empty stomach”. It matches, it lights up bodies that have been eroticized by words and by images.
The entanglement of situations, the shifting images slip between metaphors, innuendos and the references to cinema. The flame of the match that has been struck blinds more than it illuminates. The flame is as much one of seduction as of ritual, the origin of the fire that will burn the Bonhomme Carnaval, thus signaling the end of the cold season and atoning for the sins of the community.
In this spirit of openness and outreach to the inhabitants of Villeurbanne, IAC and URDLA will extend their activities into the street by multiplying artistic encounters based on exhibitions they host. From URDLA to IAC by way of the Ferme des artisans, the artists will propose shared moments in the form of rituals, walks, dance, readings and workshops...
La Fabrique du Nous, is also a school established by the Brain space laboratory for the purposes of experimenting with other models of relationships based on the sensitive experience that art offers. The objective here is also to discover the intersecting research done by artists and scientists with the potential to question our vision of the world for the purposes of transforming ourselves.
For its first edition, La Fabrique du Nous has chosen to build upon ritual practices driven mainly by female artists for the power of the connections that they generate. Originally intended to open last Spring, a Spring that was lost to us, it will now take place in the Autumn. Representing even more of a challenge in this time of social distancing, La Fabrique du Nous emerges as a deep breath of fresh air.
By celebrating the winter solstice, the artists invite us to prepare Spring of next year and a renewal: learning together to craft Us, is necessary, now more than ever.
The IAC & URDLA teams
RITUEL·LE·S > IAC
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Bertille Bak, Clarissa Baumann, Tiphaine Calmettes, Charlotte Cherici, Adélaïde Feriot, Amélie Giacomini et Laura Sellies, Célia Gondol, Lola Gonzàlez, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Shirazeh Houshiary, Suzanne Husky, Seulgi Lee, Maria Loboda, Sandra Lorenzi, Ana Mendieta, Cynthia Montier & Ophélie Naessens, Gina Pane, Lygia Pape, Adrian Piper, Stéphanie Raimondi, Charwei Tsai.The ritual, like art, inaugurates and repeats a series of codified acts and words. Religious, magical or daily, of passage, purification or bewitchment, it is located between being and doing, between gesture and speech. Symbolic in nature, the ritual creates the conditions for the repeated emergence of related communities, and of Us, at the heart of this project.
The winter period that welcomes the exhibition invites torpor and retreat – similar to what a certain number of us experienced during lockdown – this moment of latency can
also be a time of preparation: don’t the days get longer the day after the winter solstice? In this regenerative period of waiting and expectation, ancient or newer rituals are potential processes of transformation that can renew the stories we tell and outline a different relationship with our surroundings.
This exhibition, the result of the efforts of a whole team, weaves together work done by historically renowned artists such as Lygia Pape, Gina Pane and Adrian Piper, selected from the collection of the IAC and other public collections, with work done by guest artists, including participants from Brain space laboratory. By linking these works done by female artists from different generations, Rituel·le·s wishes to consider the individual and collective as a whole and to place common experience at the heart of its activity.
Rituel·le·s draws its power from ecofeminism, a militant movement that emerged in the United States in the 1980's and that combines ecology with feminism in peaceful and creative actions. It resulted from debates that continue to echo widely today, with ecofeminist thought aiming to deconstruct the concept of nature while pointing out the joint domination exercised over both nature and women. The latter struggle to reappropriate their bodies and their relationship with the Earth and the rest of the living world, notably through the intermediary of sororal rituals1. The exhibition is nourished by this “art of transformation of self and the world”2 attaching the concept of ritual to the feminine.
Polysemic and protean, the ritual deploys a strong performative and aesthetic dimension where the staging of bodies is decisive. Many female artists quite rightly approach their performances as potential rituals, opportunities to outline their place – our place – within the living world through the intermediary of gestures, objects, moments of shared spirituality, incantations and ceremonies; so many alternative ways to revive collective emancipation, again.
A tribute to all women, predominant in essential services during the recent health crisis, agents of rituals of care.
—
1 Sorority is a concept equivalent to that of fraternity that describes the principal of solidarity and community among women.
2 Émilie Hache, preface to Starhawk, Rêver l’obscur. Femmes, magie et politique, Paris, Éditions Cambourakis, 2015, p.12.
Adélaïde Feriot, "Insulaire (avant l’orage), 2016" - Lancement de l'exposition "Rituel·le·s", 29.10.2020 from Institut d'art contemporain on Vimeo.
Maïté marra > URDLA
At URDLA, Maïté Marra questions the singular fabric of an “us” that borders on a courtship ritual, taking Cary Grant, a figure created by Hollywood cinema, as its starting point.
The proposition unfolds in two stages, firstly with the presentation of Monument 600 dpi, an immersive installation made up of ten screens that randomly project sixty films. A scanner, that turns on to capture an image with a resolution of 600 dpi, is the only light that shines in these intimate, everyday spaces. It functions like a cinema machine that mechanically determines for how long the images appear, while lighting the spaces and sculpting faces and unmoving bodies out of moving shadows.
Monument 600 dpi will then fade from view to make way for DURGENCE LAMOUR and the figure of Cary Grant, and more specifically his ambiguous performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The box of matches, inscribed with the initials of the character Roger O. Thornhill, ROT, is, in his hand, the primary object of the ritual’s beginning. As for Eve Kendall, she joins the dance with the phrase: “I never discuss love on an empty stomach”. It matches, it lights up bodies that have been eroticized by words and by images.
The entanglement of situations, the shifting images slip between metaphors, innuendos and the references to cinema. The flame of the match that has been struck blinds more than it illuminates. The flame is as much one of seduction as of ritual, the origin of the fire that will burn the Bonhomme Carnaval, thus signaling the end of the cold season and atoning for the sins of the community.
