Heart of Flint
Since 2006 the artists’ residencies at La Galerie have each focused on specific thematic concerns, with the resultant works shown alongside those of other artists from the international scene. This year a call for projects under the heading “long-distance rituals: mises en scène, arrangements and traces of ritual in the art of today” led the panel to choose Pauline Curnier Jardin for a nine-month residency in Noisy-le-Sec.
The distinctive character of her work, with its formal profusion and numerous collaborations with artists from the performance, cinema and music spheres, has led me to modify the format of this exhibition and to invite Pauline Curnier Jardin to select a group of artists from among those she has worked with. The outcome of this carte blanche approach, “Coeur de Silex/Heart of Flint” is both an exhibition and a series of events organised by the La Galerie team.
The exhibition “Coeur de Silex/Heart of Flint” was devised by Pauline Curnier Jardin while she was making a film of the same name, inspired by the buried history of Noisy-le-Sec. The recent discovery by archaeologists of a Palaeolithic biface flint harks back to the traumatic bombing of the nearby railway yards by the Allies on 18 April 1944; by the strangest of coincidences the very site on which the Art Centre now stands was occupied in the 1930s by a prehistory museum, where the rediscovered stone axe was on display.
The exhibition’s scenography revolves around a standing stone designed by Rachel Garcia for our Column Room: a kind of clearing where, in the course of the exhibition, various “On the Biface” events will take place – among them imaginary ceremonies dedicated to this strange mineral artefact – as the works radiate out from it. Meanwhile the basement has been transformed into a cave housing the project Grotta Profunda.
Welcome, then, to the “Heart of Flint” nebula, where props become sculptures, installations become costumes, staging becomes drawing – all in a deliberate jumble of ephemeral forms. Where the human turns into the animal, vegetable or mineral, but also, sometimes, into artefact. Where the archaic encounters the burlesque. Where avant-garde figures, B-movies, the arts and popular tradition rub shoulders as the ranking of genres is done away with.
Marianne Lanavère
around the exhibition
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01/01/1970
8 p.m.
concerts Arlt + Eloïse Decazes and Éric Chenaux
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01/01/1970
5:30 p.m.
conference “Monster children through the history of cinema” by Marguerite Vappereau
+ X and the End concert (Electronicat & Miss le Bomb) (melodramatic popular songs)
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01/01/1970
5:30 p.m.
Performances, Dominique Gilliot + Gwyneth Bison
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01/01/1970
5:30 p.m.
Simon Fravega (performance), Hélène Iratchet (dance), Midget! (experimental folk concert), the endimanchés / Alexis Forestier (rural punk), Mosh Mosh (electric death metal comedy).