XXXTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP OF FRAC DES PAYS DE LA LOIRE
curator : Dorothée Dupuis
Guested artists : Julien Creuzet, Adriana Minoliti, Ximena Garrido Lecca, Fernando Palma Rodriguez, Gala Porras Kim.
residence 12th September - 20th November 2016
exhibition 19th November 2016 - 29th January 2017
The exhibition is accompanied by an online publication entitled « The Late Shift », dedicated to the making of the exhibition and to the expansion of its conceptual reflexion.
Boulevard Ampère
44470 Carquefou
France
free entrance
opening 18th November 2016 18:30 pm
press meeting 18th November 2016 15 pm
Notes from the future: a crossbreed laborer’s diary is an exhibition which openly questions the Europeans’ future through the experience of an imaginary citizen whose identity, productive site and relationship of his own body immersed in a complex technological environment will stress the lapse of the continental democratic project and the urgency of redesigning important definitions.
Therefore, this exhibition aims to lucidly explore the construction of the current European identity by the exploration of a futurist scenario where the imaginary allows us to contemplate alternative horizons.
The exhibition intends to consider these topics, deliberately external to them, from the point of view of artists from America, where the curator lives currently, and where the concepts of belonging, citizenship and social progress are treated very differently.
As attentive observers of the society where they come from, the artists transform these realities in a conceptual material so they can work with them during the residency at FRAC and propose, within this fictional context proposed by the exhibition, points of view which their subjectivity nourishes the realism.
However, these artists are also integrated actors into a very normalized and hierarchical system that is the world of international contemporary art. Therefore, their works are equally shaped by their experience as workers who are aware of their place in the heart of globalized constructive processes, whether symbolic or concrete, and by their constant exchanges, whether they are ethereal, physical or financial.
Julien Creuzet uses the shape of the “archipelago” inherited from Edouard Glissant as a conceptual and aesthetic drive of a practice that tries to restore the poetry of the fragmented identities of a post-colonial world. Ximena Garrido-Lecca (Lima, 1980) explores territories damaged by the history in order to remove architectural or narrative elements that, within the room of a white cube, are converted in several fragile resistances. Adriana Minoliti (Buenos Aires, 1980) uses the space of the painting and sculpture as an imaginary refuge for hybrid creatures, half-animal, half-human like, extending in “cyborg” mode, the modernist taming dream. Fernando Palma Rodriguez (Milpa Alta,1980) builds mechatronic sculptures which evoke the Mexicans cosmogonies from where he is and also the dramatic ecologic situation of his hometown, Milpa Alta, engulfed for decades by the monstrous growth of the City of Mexico. Gala Porras-Kim’s plastic language (Bogota, 1984) gets its inspiration from the universe of Archeology and Linguistics in order to create collections of invented artifacts which challenge mischievously the stablished cultural classifications.
Performance and writing; video, photography and drawing; respectful sculptures of the traditions, assemblagist or nearly-bionic; appropriation and errancy: the mixture of mediums in the heart of the works of art stresses the complex relationships that we have with landscape, language, technology and our affectionate ones. The exhibition dreams as if it was a foundational tale of a new reality, a space out of the world where we could, while it occurs, amplify the whisper of those who used shut themselves up, while the usual hierarchies would temporarily be quieted down or reversed in the most incompatible way. The subjective body and the passage of the crossbreed man from the title incarnate a possibly restorative aporia, a moving bulwark and a necessary one against the intolerance and the barbarism.
One of the first program of the kind in France, the Frac des Pays de la Loire organizes since 1984 the International Workshop. The Frac develops through this exceptional experimental program a strong incentive towards artistic production contributing to enrich its collection in an original manner. A place for research, exchange, and production, the International Workshop is meant to be a laboratory for action and reaction.
Every year during two months, it allows the invited artists to work and meet various actors of the corporate world, of the art world (curators, art critics, gallerists), as well as students of the nearby universities and art schools who assist them. The works produced on site are then presented to the public into an exhibition.
