Events

20/11/07, 7pm
WELCOME TO OUR HOUSE, Residency Scrapbook
A tale by Patrick Bernier, Olive Martin and Myriame El Yamani

In January 2006, we left Montréal. We had spent six months there thanks to a res­i­dency pro­gram*. We had arrived with the curiosity and the naiveté of new­comers. With the hopes of the Indians, the Inuits and the White Negroes. Perhaps also with the arro­gance of the French from France. Favorable cur­rent events and for­tu­itous encoun­ters had quickly stim­u­lated a reflec­tion already engaged with iden­tity and ter­ri­tory. Welcome to Our House is a scrap­book that nar­rates this res­i­dency. Anecdotes from our stay mingle with descrip­tions of artistic pro­jects pro­duced or in pro­cess. The text was not written, but elab­o­rated by suc­ces­sive trans­fers from the artists’ words to the sto­ry­teller and from the sto­ry­teller to her lis­tener. It doesn’t repeat itself, it risks itself with every pre­sen­ta­tion. After an ini­tial return to France in January 2007••, Myriame El Yamani, a sto­ry­teller from Montreal, returns today to bring us this account from the other side of the Atlantic.

Olive Martin and Patrick Bernier live and work in Nantes. In their col­lec­tive pro­ject, “WEL­COME TO OUR HOUSE, Residency Scrapbook” sit­u­ates itself between “Man­muswak,” a short film por­traying an immi­grant to Nantes, cre­ated in 2005, and “Pro­ject for a Jurisprudence” (This prob­ably has an English title already… ), an attempt to open a breach in immi­gra­tion law cur­rently being car­ried out through a res­i­dency at the Aubervilliers Laboratories.
Woman of words, Myriame El Yamai draws her inspi­ra­tion from the memory of those who sur­round her, from the saline scents of Acacia, the secrets of her Vendean grand­mother, the colors and arabesques of Maghreb and Yemen, the wisdom of Africa and the mys­teries of the Mediterranean.

”WELCOME TO OUR HOUSE, Residency Scrabook” was cre­ated during the Inclassables Program, co-financed by CulturesFrance, the Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec and the Franco-Quebecois Office for Youth.
The account was adapted to a hexag­onal con­text at the time of a short res­i­dency as part of the cura­to­rial cycle “Fic­tion” by Estelle Nabeyrat and Fréderic Maufras at the gallery La Box in Bourges.

05/12/07, 8:30pm
Vox Artisti: la voix de ses maîtres
Lecture by Guillaume Désanges, assisted by Mélanie Mermod

This con­fer­ence was spe­cially pro­duced for the per­for­mance fes­tival “Trouble” (Halles de Schaerbeek, Brussels, 2007). Drawing from hun­dreds of extracts of archives, sound, per­for­mances, con­fer­ences and artist inter­views, Guillaume Désanges uses the format of the con­fer­ence to pro­pose a per­spec­tive on the rela­tion­ships between voice and the visual arts through a fic­ti­tious dia­logue between “phan­toms.” He pre­sents a cer­tain his­tory of the voice in art, not as a genealogy of sound poetry, but rather as the har­nessing and the hearing of a secret dia­logue between artists that don’t know each other and may have already dis­ap­peared. By means of mon­tage, he cre­ates a “forced”, arti­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tion between artists, like a musical score. To stop looking and simply to listen: to foot­steps, breath, laughter, and whistles, to hesi­ta­tions, dis­courses, dec­la­ra­tions and harangues. This could also resemble a séance for con­juring spirits. It is matter of believing in the strength – emo­tional, but also cog­ni­tive and intel­lec­tual, or in a word, “artistic” – of the artist’s voice, but also of iso­lating snip­pets of phrases and with them, cre­ating a new propo­si­tion.

During the con­fer­ence, the room is kept dark. The speaker directly tran­scribes his dis­course, which is pro­jected onto a large screen, while sonorous extracts from art­works and artist inter­views are dif­fused through the space. The speaker remains mute, leaving the “speech” to the artists.

Guillaume Désanges : born in 1971, art critic and curator.
Co-founder and co-director of Work Method, an inde­pen­dent struc­ture for exhi­bi­tion curating and pro­jects prode­cu­tion. Member of the edi­to­rial comittee of the magazine Trouble and French cor­re­spon­dent for the magazines Exit Express and Exit Book (Madrid), he has worked with Thomas Hirschhorn (24h Foucault, Musée Précaire Albinet) and coor­di­nated the artistic activ­i­ties of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2001-2007). He devel­oped sev­eral cura­to­rial pro­jects dealing with per­for­mance such as "Une his­toire de la per­for­mance en 20 min­utes" (Centre Pompidou, Paris / De Appel, Amsterdam / MacVal, Paris / U-Turn, Copenhagen, etc..) or "Vox Artisti, la voix de ses maîtres" (Halles de Schaerbeek, Bruxelles), organ­ised and co-organ­ised the exhi­bi­tions Pick-Up at Public, Paris, Intouchable, l’Idéal Transparence at the Villa Arson (Nice) and at Musée Patio Herreriano (Valladolid) and Jiri Kovanda vs Reste du monde, galerie gb agency (Paris), De Appel (Amsterdam), La Passerelle (Brest), Centre d’Art Santa Monica (Barcelone).
In 2007-2008, he is asso­ciate curator in charge of the pro­gram of the centre d’art la Tôlerie, at Clermont-Ferrand. He is also teaching at the Fine Arts School of Clermont-Ferrand.

07/12/07, 8:30pm
Cinema of People: films by Lawrence Weiner (first part)
Films: Altered to Suit, 1979 (22’), Passage to the North, 1981 (17’), Plowmans Lunch, 1982 (29’)
With the sup­port of Marian Goodman Gallery

While Lawrence Weiner’s work is best known in the form of tex­tual anno­ta­tions, pre­sented on walls of exhi­bi­tion spaces or in public spaces, the artist uses also video and film since the late 60s to pre­sent his art­works. These films, rarely shown until recently, can shed new light on his prac­tice: taking the form of fic­tions and using struc­tures inspired by New Wave cinema, they fit awk­wardly in the cat­e­gory of con­cep­tu­alism in which Weiner’s work is often clas­si­fied. Questions of pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion, as well as the col­lab­o­ra­tive aspect of the cin­e­mato­graphic pro­duc­tion, occupy a cen­tral place in this work, thus laying the foun­da­tion for a “cinema of people”: “I wanted a sit­u­a­tion that would allow me to get out of the ivory tower of the studio, where all the deci­sions are made by the artist. With my films, I found myself in a posi­tion where, since there were things that I didn’t know how to do myself, I had to con­vince others that the pro­ject was worth­while.” The three films pre­sented in this first screening address ques­tions of space, place and dis­place­ment as recur­rent themes in Weiner’s work, and stage the inter­ac­tions of char­ac­ters con­fronted by these prob­lem­atics. 

14/12/07, 8:30pm
Cinema of People: films by Lawrence Weiner (second part)
Film: A First Quarter, 1972 (85’)
With the sup­port of Marian Goodman Gallery

"Using the struc­ture of a fea­ture film as its basic format, A First Quarteradopts the prin­ci­ples of nou­velle vague cinema as its role model. Simultaneous real­i­ties, altered flash­backs, plays on time and space are all com­po­nents of the form and con­tent of the film. Because it was orig­i­nally shot in video and then kinescoped to 16 mm film, A First Quarter has acquired a poetic, soft look. The dia­logue con­sists entirely of the work as it is spoken and read, built, enacted, written and painted by the players. As the sce­narios build, they appear as tropes, one after another." Alice Weiner.

19/12/07, 7pm
Talk by L’Ambassade (Cécilia Becanovic and Maxime Thiéffine)
A lec­ture by l’Ambassade Cécilia Becanovic and Maxime Thieffine are con­tin­uing their inves­ti­ga­tions with the help from nar­ra­tors they met in novels, films and works of art.

L’Ambassade is Cécilia Becanovic and Maxime Thieffine, a team of two cura­tors of con­tem­po­rary art exhi­bi­tions. This col­lab­o­ra­tion was born out of a shared obses­sion for accu­mu­lating repro­duc­tions of art works via books or the internet and from the sub­se­quent neces­sity to organise this expanding memory. What started as a pri­vate hobby became a shared activity and the beginining of L’Ambassade. Mixing those two archives together, they create links and cura­to­rial pro­jects which can lead to either an exhi­bi­tion or a video pro­gram or a lec­ture or a pub­li­ca­tion or an exhi­bi­tion tem­plate as a pdf file.
They use works of art, dig­ital art work repro­duc­tions, other images sources, doc­u­ments, texts, casual objects, frag­ments of TV pro­grams, etc.
They attempt to draw out secret genealo­gies between artists from dif­ferent times and ori­en­ta­tions, being at once his­tor­ical, ped­a­gogic & playful in their approach. Tracing paths with art works is a way to appro­priate them, to speak with and through them. In order to tell hidden sto­ries or to mul­tiply the con­nec­tions we may have with them.

12/01/08, 2:30pm
Théâtre des opéra­tions
Panel with Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marie de Brugrolle, Joris Lacoste, Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (Cie Les Gens d’Uterpan)

The round table dis­cus­sion Théâtre des opéra­tions is orga­nized around two ques­tions that con­cern modes of pre­sen­ta­tion from per­for­mance, the­ater and exhi­bi­tions: how can we approach the exhi­bi­tion format in terms of the­atri­cality? And how can we con­sider the­ater and per­for­mance in terms of an exhi­bi­tion? The pan­elists rep­re­sent diverse dis­ci­plines, from the visual arts to the­ater and dance. Their prac­tices, how­ever, all nego­tiate the ways in which a work is pre­sented by ini­ti­ating unex­pected cor­re­spon­dences between dif­ferent pre­sen­ta­tion for­mats. The evening will notably address ques­tions about the specific tem­po­ral­i­ties and the par­tic­ular rela­tion­ship to recep­tion gen­er­ated by the con­fronta­tion of these for­mats.

16/01/08, 7pm
« Unpacking My Library »
Lecture by Yann Sérandour

Drawing his title from Walter Benjamin’s essay on the col­lector, Yann Sérandour unveils an selec­tion of works from his library. The library, "joy of the pri­vate man" as well as broad net­work of cor­re­spon­dences, cre­ates an inter­face between the cre­ative act and the social con­text that sur­rounds it. Yann Sérandour’s inserts into the art his­tory library reveal his rela­tion to art through the book. Whether insets, appen­dices, sup­ple­ments or foot­notes, his work is char­ac­ter­ized by its inter­sti­tial and poly­mor­phic nature. ’Historical’ works, texts and visual signs serve as sources for his par­a­sitic, dis­lo­cated read­ings.
By extending the propo­si­tions of other artist with his unex­pected devel­op­ments, he has notably pub­lished Thirtysix Fire Stations in ref­er­ence to the works of 60s artist Ed Ruscha, and a sup­ple­ment to be inserted in the cat­a­logue raisonné Specific & General Works, which pre­sents Lawrence Weiner’s work from 1968 to 1993.

Born in 1974, Yann Sérandour is cur­rently in res­i­dency at the Cité inter­na­tionale des arts in Paris. He recently exhib­ited at the CNEAI (Chatou) in 2007.

23/01/08, 7pm
My friends of reflec­tive abstrac­tion
Invitation to Falke Pisano
Performances and read­ings by Will Holder, Frank Koolen, Charlotte Moth, Falke Pisano

For Rendez-vous Falke Pisano invited two artists and a writer/designer/editor with whose prac­tices she feels to be in con­tin­uous con­ver­sa­tion. The per­for­mances and read­ings that will be pre­sented during the evening have in common that they orig­i­nate in the reflec­tive rela­tion between the self and aspects of the external world (lit­er­a­ture, nature and the super­nat­ural, con­fined space, form) and show an aware­ness of the gen­er­a­tive quality of the pro­cesses of per­cep­tion, inter­pre­ta­tion and (re)con­struc­tion.

Will Holder (UK) once read that the oral tra­di­tion would lead us out of the post-modern con­di­tion, and has since become pre­oc­cu­pied with "pub­lishing". The majority of the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion is spent in finding suit­able forms for trans­mis­sion, as these pub­li­ca­tions do not always take the form of ink and paper. True to his typo­graph­ical roots, he is inter­ested in scoring and com­po­si­tion as an inter­me­diary, or set of instruc­tions for the artic­u­la­tion of lan­guage, and its rela­tion­ship to a sculp­tural, 3-dimen­sional space.
Will Holder recently co-edited and designed "Agapê" and "Intersections" with Alex Waterman (NY) Miguel Abreu Gallery (NY) and The Kitchen (NY): an inves­ti­ga­tion into the social impli­ca­tions of reading, and var­ious methods of writing and scoring from the late 60s until today. Holder and Waterman are cur­rently working on a mono­graph in the form of oper­atic scores of com­poser Robert Ashley. He is also cur­rently editing a book on the writ­ings and lec­tures of Falke Pisano for the Henry Moore Institute, England; and is editor (with Dieter Roelstraete and Ann Demeester) and designer of FR DAVID, de Appel’s journal based on reading and writing in the arts.

The work of Frank Koolen (NL) can be described as an ongoing search for moments in which the everyday and the mag­ical seem to col­lide, cre­ating unex­pected logic. Helped by this logic he inves­ti­gates new pos­si­bil­i­ties to reac­ti­vate the meaning of (some­times gen­er­ally known) objects, images and ideas and he inves­ti­gates the pre­car­ious link between the self and the world of objects. Covering vir­tu­ally all media in his work, he dis­plays a direct pro­cess-related atti­tude towards the world, art, his actual sur­round­ings and him­self.
Frank Koolen’ s work has recently been shown at de Appel, W139, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Reliance in London. He ran the tem­po­rary tele­vi­sion sta­tion “Gen­erosity Television”, made the set design for the modern dance piece “Eureka steps! Composing the unsought’ by Monica Antezana and pub­lished sev­eral excerpts from his pho­to­graphic archive in book­form.
Frank Koolen is cur­rently res­i­dent at de Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Charlotte Moth (UK) has an ongoing col­lec­tion of images con­cerned with a phe­nomeno­log­ical reading of archi­tec­tural spaces. Looking at avenues of exter­nal­iza­tion for these images create moments where an image’s essence or speci­ficity is explored. This results in a prac­tice where the mediums of sculp­ture, instal­la­tion, writing and pho­tog­raphy find a way to cross over cre­ating a ground and con­text of inves­ti­ga­tion.
Charlotte Moth has recently shown work at Jet in Berlin, Project in Dublin and Dolores at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam. She also works col­lab­o­ra­tively with the artist Peter Fillingham, where recent shows have been shown at Cell, London and the David Risley Gallery, London. She is involved in the artist ini­tia­tive falke­and­char­lotte. Charlotte Moth is par­tic­i­pating in the cur­rent pro­mo­tion of the Pavilion at the Palais de Tokyo and will be involved in a group exhi­bi­tion at the Palais de Tokyo in March.

The lec­ture-per­for­mances, text-based video’s, objects and pho­to­copied pub­li­ca­tions of Falke Pisano (NL) are the ele­ments of a body of work that is dis­tinctly induced by a prac­tice of writing. Although mainly text-based, Pisano’s work dis­plays a strong con­cern with the exis­tence and fea­tures of con­crete objects, and in par­tic­ular abstract con­crete objects. Using lan­guage as a means to re-think the poten­tial of abstrac­tion, sculp­ture and artistic prac­tice she acti­vates the abstract sculp­ture as a thought-gen­er­ating prin­ciple and employs the idea of the instable, trans­forming and dis­in­te­grating object as a way to address issues con­cerning object-qual­i­ties, form, con­struc­tion and engage­ment.
Falke Pisano wrote essays for sev­eral pub­li­ca­tions, set up the mobile artists ini­tia­tive falke­and­char­lotte together with Charlotte Moth and orga­nized the sym­po­sium As Yet about the nature of spec­u­la­tion in De Appel with Will Holder. She cur­rently has a solo show at BaliceHertling in Paris. Upcoming shows include a col­lab­o­ra­tive show with Benoît Maire at Croy Nielsen, Berlin and a per­for­mance at The Berlin Biennale.
Falke Pisano is artist in res­i­dence at Villa Arson.