Maison Européenne de la Photographie 5, 7 Rue de Fourcy 75004 Paris France
Festival Art Outsiders www.art-outsiders.com
The 2009 edition of the @rt Outsiders Festival —celebrating this year its tenth anniversary—focuses on extreme environments.
These are environments that were, until recently, uninhabited by human beings and that contemporary science and technology turn into "inhabitable" places (Antarctica, underwater world, outer space, deserts); but also those that are becoming "uninhabitable" due to the impacts of our way of life (pollution, technological accidents, economical pressures and global warming).
(Un)Inhabitable? – Art of Extreme Environments presents works that explore the meaning of living in extreme environments, in the imaginary realm as well as in the physical one, in the political, social and environmental fields as well as in the poetic ones.
Exhebitions :
Stephen Eastaugh - Antarctic Sculpture Garden 2003
In 2003, while he was an artist in residence at the Australian Antarctic Base of Davis, Stephen Eastaugh created a sculpture garden with found material. @rt Outsiders presents a series of photographs of this «garden» which evokes the environment with an iceberg (Headhome-Berg), a polar tent (Headhome-Polar Tent), a living container (Headhome Bonsai Donga) and a sign post reading Everysomewherever.
Currently wintering over at Mawson Base, Stephen Eastaugh writes: An element of homage creeps into all my work along with this desire to know the place and communicate this knowing but it is too big to know and must be constantly re-mapped. In the end, as I hold on to the blizzard line, it seems that all I can do is increase the puzzle of awareness.
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Connie Mendoza - Numerical Desert 2008
Production and first exhibition @rt Outsiders 2009
The Chilean desert of Atacama is like a palimpsest upon wich the different layers of human presence are written: the Chuquicamata copper mine, then the ALMA Observatory (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) have shaped the landscape.
Numerical Desert, combining photographic images and images of digital datas, is a work about memory and images, science research and personal experience. The mine, nearby which the artist is born, triggers evanescent memories, mental images related to exile : ALMA produces digital images of the first moments of the universe.
Connie Mendoza writes : Both image sources have in common that they reveal themselves as visions, optic phenomenons, Fata Morganas or hallucinations. Maybe because both, the memory and the techno-science search the secret origin that hasn't to be revealed totally, may it be the origin of the universe in an infinite time or the origin of a particular and momentarily past.
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Bradley Pitts - Singular Oscillations 2008-2009
In 2008, for Singular Oscillations, Bradley Pitts performed a parabolic flight at the Cosmonaut Training Center Yuri Gagarin near Moscow. Naked, eyes closed, ears protected from outside sounds, he dived into the mental and physical feelings, the internal and external perceptions, brought by weightlessness.
Bradley Pitts writes: where does the frontier between the inside and the outside, the self and the other lay? May be it is like the Earth atmosphere that dissipates slowly as we move away from its surface, that does not end up brutaly but becomes finer and finer until it is replaced by the void of space.
Connie Mendoza - Numerical Desert ( Désert numérique ) 2008
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Yang Yi - Uprooted 2008
A ghost town, half-destroyed buildings falling apart and, attending to what looks like everyday activities, a few people: the dark images of Yang Yi are weaving the remains of Kaixian, his 1800 year old home town before it disappeared under the Yangtse River waters with the inhabitants wandering in the wreckage with masks and snorkels. Only the bubbles, coming out of them, indicate the city is now drowned under water.
The Three Gorges Dam in China is the longest in the world and will be the most important in regard to production capacity.
The ecological consequences for the fauna and the human impacts of the dam —over a million people displaced and the flooding of a high number of archeological sites— have created a huge worldwide controversies.
Yang Yi writes : It is difficult for me to talk of these different photographs. Haunting souvenirs always come back to my mind. A feel like freezing, down to the bones.