FRAC CHAMPAGNE-ARDENNE

The film Outwardly from Earth’s Center builds on the narrative of a fictitious society on an unstable piece of land in danger of disappearing. This situation requires the population’s collective initiative in order to secure each individual’s survival and the society to sustain. The fictional setting is a reference to Gotska Sandön, a Swedish island north of Gotland in the Baltic Sea which moves approximately one meter a year. Fictitious reports of experts draw a surrealist picture of this happening. The experience of what might at first seem to be a beautiful documentary develops into a more abstract and slightly absurd picture of the inhabitant’s struggles and vulnerability.

FRAC NORMANDIE

« Whatever the intentions of these forms on the desert, they are morphically related to certain arts we see today. » Robert Morris, Aligned with Nazca, 1975.
This film follows in the footsteps of two historic works by Robert Morris: Observatory, an earthwork built in Holland in 1971, and Aligned with Nazca, a textual piece published in Artforum in October 1975 and illustrated with archive images and photographs taken by Morris on his journey to Peru in search of the Nazca civilization and its mysterious geoglyphs. Louidgi Beltrame connects two sites by activating the Observatory located on the polders in the Netherlands and the Nazca lines located on a large desert plateau on the southern coast of Peru.
The film combines and updates heterogeneous spaces and eras – pre-Columbian archaeological territories, the theoretical tensions of 70s art, from Minimalism to Land Art – while summoning performance, electronic music and cosmic cycles.

FRAC FRANCHE-COMTÉ

Photographer and video artist Mohamed Bourouissa stages the suburbs. He is interested in the balance of power between the population and the authorities, and questions the mechanics of power through iconic images whose aesthetic often refers to Géricault or Caravaggio. In a critical relationship with images and the prejudices conveyed by the media, he takes as his subjects those who find themselves on the edge, between integration and exclusion. His work is part of the collection of the Frac Franche-Comté, which acquired the video ALL-IN, which he produced in 2012 as part of the Nuit Blanche, at the invitation of the Monnaie de Paris.

In this film, two seemingly incompatible worlds collide: that of capitalism, money and power as represented by France’s oldest institution, the Monnaie de Paris, and that of rap, whose origins date back to the 1970s in the American ghettos and which, after spreading around the world, remains today one of the symbols of minority discontent and protest.

ALL-IN orchestrates the unlikely meeting of these two worlds, while questioning the fabrication of image, in the sense of a mark of notoriety: that of the immutable institution and its gold, that of a rapper whose lyrics place him on the fringe and the anti-system. And so we watch as master engravers at the Monnaie de Paris factory in Pessac produce a medal bearing Booba’s likeness, based on a drawing by Mohamed Bourouissa.

Set to the soundtrack of the rapper’s autobiographical song Foetus, the film takes on the look and feel of a rap video, borrowing its codes and clichés: money, luxury items and pretty women. It ends in the sumptuous salons of the venerable institution, located on Quai Conti in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. These seem to have been the scene of a lavish reception that, if the remains are to be believed, got a little out of hand. An avalanche of coins destroyed the decor.

An ad hoc alliance between the institution and one of the figures of the urban counter-culture, ALL-IN is an allegory of the « liberal anarchism » that reigns in our Western societies, where money is the vector and symbol of individual success.
It underlines the connivance and symbiotic relationship between these two worlds, which we might wrongly believe to be irreconcilable.

Born in 1978 in Blida (AL), Mohamed Bourouissa lives and works in Paris (FR). Mohamed Bourouissa describes contemporary society implicitly, by its contours. With a critical take on the mass media image, the subjects of his photographs and videos are people left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion. Preceded by a long immersion phase, each of Mohamed Bourouissa’s projects builds a new enunciation situation.

Source: Mohamed Bourouissa — Projects

FRAC SUD – Cité de l’art contemporain

The Bourbaki Panorama, painted in 1881 by Edouard Castres, depicts an episode from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It differs from the few panoramas still in use today in that it is neither a grandiose landscape nor a heroic panorama. Instead, it shows the routed French army crossing the border, and the humanitarian aspect of the situation, as seen through the eyes of Switzerland.
Marie-José Burki films this panorama in her video, Petit Grand Monde. She writes: « The passage of my camera places the curvature of the canvas and the false ground on the same videographic surface, the camera flattening them. They become one and the same surface, the video surface. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between the painted canvas and the various objects placed on the false ground, and the relationships that can be created by the video between the two dimensions of the painting and the three dimensions of the mannequins and accessories on the false ground. The passage of the camera across the canvas puts everything on the same visual plane, replacing the overall representation with a detailed view of what the visitor cannot see in Lucerne. Circularity is of the utmost importance: the canvas extends 360 degrees, time and space turn in on themselves, and the passage of the camera details the representation, giving visibility to the multiple elements that make it up.
As the camera moved across the panorama, I associated it with twelve descriptions of press images, media images in other words. I simply described what I saw in the press photographs, photographs that don’t necessarily relate to the question of migration, photographs that I selected because they bore witness to relationships in the tensions of the contemporary world. I wanted to weave together the sudden appearance of the text with the slow passage over the panorama: what we see and what we read are heterogeneous planes, yet close in content. The painted canvas, the objects in the faux-terrain, the descriptions – these three layers, in reality distinct, come together in the single, flat surface of the video ».

Marie-José Burki’s video, Petit Grand Monde, films the Bourbaki Panorama created in 1881 by painter Edouard Castres. The work depicts an episode in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which the routed French army is taken over by Switzerland. She shows the details of this representation and gives a new visibility to its multiple elements. She combines this with twelve descriptions of press images, in the form of text, revealing the tensions of the contemporary world.

Source : Baronian gallery file

FRAC DES PAYS DE LA LOIRE

Children of Unquiet is a multipartite project by Mikhail Karikis exploring issues of post-industrialisation, landscape and the next generation. It takes place in the geothermal area of the Devil’s Valley in Tuscany, Italy, which is known for inspiring Dante’s hellish descriptions of L’Inferno, and for being the location where sustainable energy production was invented in the early 1900s and where the first geothermal power plant in the world was built. Until recently, five thousand workers and their families lived there in a group of iconic modernist industrial villages constructed around the power station by the modernist architect Giovanni Michelucci. Following the introduction of automated technologies in the power plant, unemployment in the area increased and prospects for the young became limited resulting in the rapid depopulation or abandonment of entire villages. In developing this project Karikis worked with a group of forty-five children between the ages of 5 and 12 years old, who are from the region. He devised a series of workshops and performances which generated the various parts of this project, including a film featuring a children’s ‘take over’ of an abandoned worker’s village, a board-game reactivating decision-making processes that have led to the depopulation of the region, and a futurological Super-8 film animating visions of the future of a deserted village from the point of view of children living in the area.