Forum d'Urbanisme et d'Architecture 2023

Participation of the Forum d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture in the Festival OVNi 2023.

Work presented: IL EST FATIDIQUE DE DEVINER LE NOM DU NUAGE QUI PASSE AU-DESSUS DE NOS TÊTES, 2021 by artist Églé VISMANTÉ, Lithuania/France.

In a venture shared with other artists, Églé Vismanté immersed herself for a time in a new environment as creative material, for a few days in 2021, in an isolated house in the Vésubie Valley, in search of one of those plunges into nature that nourish her work.
As it sometimes happens that chance occurrences can condition a situation through a kind of butterfly effect, it so happened that a short distance from this serene setting was a territory rendered unrecognizable by the Alex storm of the previous year, and in particular a house ripped open in a landscape that had literally become lunar, whose image, publicized ad nauseam, had by then reached the rank of symbol.
This chance encounter finally led to a project: to document the site through photography, and then to process the shots using a 3D representation tool usually reserved for architects and construction professionals, which is not considered very conducive to fantasy and yet is used here to serve an artistic purpose.

Through this technical hijacking, and starting from the simple house then restored in volume, a strange freedom takes hold of this residual structure emerging from a telluric landscape, and which the devouring mouth of the raging elements has irremediably intermingled with the matter of the precipitated mountain soil. Were it not for the gentle movement of the forms, combined with the meticulous creation of sound, there would be a potential Golem behind this morphing that takes us from the constructed surface of mankind to a subterranean world between mineral and vegetable, from which we are extricated by a final escape to the stars acting as a Lethe. Although both at the heart of the plot and protagonists of this plastic fiction, architecture and landscape reach a new dimension with this artist’s eye, drawn into a much wider cosmogony that puts them in resonance with the making of worlds1.

Églé VISMANTÉ, born in Vilnius in 1990, is a visual artist of Lithuanian origin.
She obtained her National Diploma of Plastic Arts (DNAP) from the Villa Arson in 2016, then continued her studies at the Université Côte d’Azur, where she specialized in applied multimedia.
In 2017, she was the winner of the Francis Bacon Foundation grant and had the opportunity to exhibit her work in galleries and various video festivals in France.
Having grown up in a natural environment yet steeped in industrial heritage, Eglé Vismanté brings her vision of the world through her artistic practice. Focusing mainly on drawing and video, she questions the condition of being alive in a world profoundly marked by the Anthropocene, where humanity continually manipulates and alters its environment.
For her, her work is an attempt to re-enchant the world, seeking to discover a poetry in it that she uses to address contemporary issues. Her creations focus mainly on natural landscapes and those transformed by urbanization, as well as on life in general.

Find out more about le Forum d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture