45th edition of the Les Uns Chez Les Autres festival - Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th November 2013 at the Cemetary of la Villette, Paris
Curator: Julie Navarro, in collaboration with Aurélie Tiffreau, art curator
the artists : Véronique Boutinot / Lola B Deswarte / Valérie Jouve / Jean-Paul Lefret / Marc Molk / Agathe Rosa / Jacqueline Salmon / Collectif Trafic / Le Zheng
4'33" is a musical score composed by John Cage, often described as
" four minutes and three seconds of silence " , a sonic silence produced by the sounds of the environment. Around the musical piece performed by the TRAFIC collective, the public moves through the tree-lined alleys of the La Villette cemetery to listen and see differently, " with open ears, an empty but alert mind " , freeing themselves from the urgency of the moment, contemplating the human condition from afar. In a dialogue orchestrated by trees and the memory of departed beings, works of art respond to the rhythm of signs and myths, staged on tree stumps, in chapels or from tombs (whose plots have been cleared).
This first multidisciplinary art exhibition in a Parisian cemetery is an opportunity to question the place of contemporary art in funeral art today: in the face of transformations in social norms and funeral rites, how can we preserve and enhance the memory of our elders in a society where death is taboo and funeral rites are undergoing radical social change ? How can we re-establish the place of funerary art in today's society ? How can we marry nature and culture for eternity ?
Lola B Deswarte's installations Un nuage et l'au-delà c'est sensas evoke the memory of who we were, of our vanished parts and what remains. Véronique Boutinot summons small ceramic figurines to an abandoned grave. Valérie Jouve makes her image heard with a low, muted tone like a noisy silence, like the tessitura of a restrained cello. Jean-Paul Lefret's Archanges urbains revisits the codes of popular religious imagery. Marc Molk presents Paradis, a small painting placed on a grave, like an epitaph. Agathe Rosa's RANDOM-Aléatoire questions the relationship between the city and the cemetery: light sequences fragment and animate the cemetery, shattering both its configuration and spatio-temporal reference points. Jacqueline Salmon's installation Une trop longue liste associates the names of the street's dead with an imaginary sky suggesting an afterlife. The TRAFIC collective, under the direction of Beatriz Franco, presents a multidisciplinary performance based on John Cage's concept of silence. Le Zheng seals in the image book Specimens the thoughts of ancestors.