On the day of the vernissage for the restitution of my La Petite Escalère - Voyons voir cross-residency, September 21, 2018, we danced the garden creepers, with young ballerinas from the Freedanse school and Gilbert Carty and Jérôme Cazenave, the gardeners at La Petite Escalère.
Fiona Delahaie, researcher at the University of Limoges, analyzes performance in her thesis (2022) chapter "de l'émerveillement par et dans le mouvement" (page 275 - 283)
" La métamorphose par (et dans) le mouvement, Dénètem Touam Bona associates it with the figure of the creeper through danced gesture. Indeed, for the philosopher, the wisdom of the creeper is choreographic in that it involves moving from one figure to another, while cultivating suspense. And this movement of continual transfiguration - and configuration of metamorphosed bodies - is nothing other than that of dance.
It's precisely because the liana is a chimerical entity, a sketch, a movement in suspension - that it's a call to pick up the thread, to reactivate its subversive movements through our own fugues.
During a cross-residency in 2018, Julie Navarro discovered clematis vines measuring several meters long in the sculpture garden at La Petite Escalère. For the artist, these vines were the link, the common thread of her project Dissoudre le paysage (...). For Julie Navarro, the verb " to dissolve " echoes its antonym " to resolve ". For our part, we hypothesize that dissolving the landscape refers to what we said earlier about the recosmization of the earth. To "dissolve" would be to give greater movement and pleasure to the landscape, not in the sense of rendering it abstract, but rather of reconcretizing it through these exchanges, crossings and interrelations of rhythms and enunciations.
The link between the Landes and the Bouches-du-Rhône was, as we said, conceived by the artist in response to an invitation from the associations La Petite Escalère and Voyons Voir. The idea was to reflect on the importance of water in these territories " as a natural element structuring the landscape and human activity " 814 . Indeed, as a result of global warming, La Petite Escalère has experienced repeated flooding problems. As for the Etang de Berre, which borders the Domaine de Suriane, it is experiencing a massive influx of fresh water (from an EDF power plant) into its lagoon, causing profound changes to its ecosystem. Julie Navarro was therefore inspired by the
" ribbon-like " appearance of the eelgrass found around the pond to make young ballerinas and the two gardeners from the sculpture garden dance with the vines at the opening at La Petite Escalère. In an article, art critic Léon Mychkine described Julie Navarro's work as an
" art of chiasmus " . A chiasmus is a " figure of speech consisting in reversing the order of terms in the symmetrical parts of two sentences, so as to form a parallel or an antithesis " . The two places of residence, anchored in two different regions, were thus crossed, brought into resonance by the figure of the dancing creeper.