Exhibition
18 May – 30 September 2018
Espace Apollonia
Jardin d’Apollonia
Quartier de la Robertsau
Artists :
Azara San / Stéphane Clor / Elparo / Collectif Freemousse / Eduardo Kac / LAAB / Les Nouveaux Voisins / Philippe Obliger / Marie-Hélène Richard / Agnès Rosse / The Collective
Vivacity represents the effort to bring art into the urban space. The art works involved try to reinvent the city through the dynamic of creation starting from nature. These art installations, performances, projections, graffiti etc have been chosen after an appeal to artists, architects, landscape painters and botanists. Their job was to take back our neighborhood by proposing new city set ups and urban dispositions.
Vivacity glorifies the living but it also represents the union between nature and the key elements that men use to display, like the shed represents architecture. Some of the chosen art works denounce the abuse towards plant life, for example through cotton cultivation which exploits child labour for profit. Nonetheless, complex connections are born between the natural universe and new technologies through many sensors, micro-controllers, video projections and sound emissions. Many of these works have been set in common spaces, not only for decor but so that the citizens can take care of them.
Les Nouveaux Voisins – Artefact
This porous and permeable plant architecture that protects without enclosing questions the visitor’s relationship with the world, with nature. The building material is gradually invaded by vegetation, the iron basketry takes on the appearance of a weeping willow, a tree of life symbolizing cyclical renewal.
ELPARO – Silva
An organic structure, composed of recycled wood and plants that gradually invade the graceful curve of the arch, gives a new dynamic to the entrance of the Apollonia garden. The installation highlights the force of nature on human constructions while being an allegory of the passage of time.
FREEMOUSSE – Vegetal transhumance
The intervention is part of an ecological approach to the greening of cities and the sublimation of nature in the urban setting. The figure of the bull is chosen for the Robertsau, in reference to the district’s market gardening and agricultural past.
Eduardo KAC – Lagoogleglyph
A symbolic image representing a rabbit’s head, the artist’s fetish animal, is destined for worldwide distribution through Google Earth satellites and thus connecting to any computer or telephone. The size of the pixels composing the image is specifically adapted to it.
Agnès ROSSE – Je suis une armada d’escargots affamés ! Les trous dans la jungle, festin.
A living plant path composed of plants poetically modified by the perforation of leaves. The artificial imitates the natural as when gastropods are hungry and eat. The artist’s intervention underlines, through an observation of reality, the resistance of the plant and its exemplary adaptability to external events.
Stéphane CLOR – Paysages post-numériques : Éole
The installation combining plant and technology creates a confusion between physical and digital and invites the visitor to question his own perception of movement.
Azara SAN – Geodesia #2
Over time, the model of the neighbourhood is transformed into a garden of the wild plants of our streets. An urban biodiversity is to be (re)discovered along a green line through the Robertsau – the beginning of an ecological recon-quest?
THE COLLECTIVE – Nature Queen
Audio-visual experience, immersion in the “queen nature”, a complex being that tries to establish communication with the spectators, its subjects.
Philippe OBLIGER – Sang pour cent cotons
Image-truth of 100 feet of cotton grown on a plot of red soil, denouncing the slavery and social misery linked to cotton production throughout the world dominated by agro-industrial trusts.
Marie-Hélène RICHARD – Seconde nature
An accumulation of erected furniture and totem poles hosts different kinds of plants that gradually grow there. The link is created between the wood material of the furniture and the plant from which it is made, like a fair return to its roots.
LAAB – Transduction (Sève) = Lumière
Visual installation on an LED neon light of the sap rising speed of a tree. The speed of sap flow in plants is often compared to our heart rate. The installation records the data of the speed of rising sap flow from a maple tree in the garden. This data is transmitted in real time indoors. The speed of the sap flow is thus transduced in light intensity over 12m.
In partnership with L’Escale, Emmaüs Scherwiller, KS groupe, ADIR and BNP Paribas.