Ariane Michel: La Rhétorique des marées – Vol. 2

In her project The Rhetoric of Tides, Ariane Michel takes an organic, evolving cinematic approach to investigating the role of the artist in the light of nature’s differing scales and movements.

Last summer Michel curated a venture on the wild coast of Esquibien, in Finistère, Brittany, France: an invitation to 21 artists to create works on the shoreline, at the frontier between ocean and land.* Exposed to the elements, this exhibition provided her raw material: on the fringe of this public event she brought something like a scientist’s eye to filming the artists as they moved about the landscape, from their arrival on the beach to the completion of their pieces. She then continued her visual recording of the exhibition’s ongoing transformations.

Her video installation at La Criée is a concentrate of the event and its multiple time frames. Those of the artists: their bodies, actions and respiration. Those of the works: fleeting performances, fragile creations soon swept away, and more enduring constructions. But also the time frames of everything making up the setting in space-time contexts other than our own: granite, crabs, lichen, the swell of the sea, and so on—a host of custodians imbuing the place with their varied scales. As is her wont, Ariane Michel made her film by adopting their point of view. From the level of a limpet or a winkle, during the lifespan of a broom leaf, obeying the edginess of egrets or the indifference of stone, she has chosen here to reveal and intensify the vertigo triggered by bringing all these states of being together with what the artists are doing. Thus she takes the viewer on an intuitive sensory journey whose shifting points of view can lead him or her to a change of paradigm, and even of skin.

* The Rhetoric of Tides – Vol. 1, July 5–September 30, 2015, at Esquibien, Brittany, with: Virginie Barré, Julien Bismuth, Michel Blazy, Florence Doléac, Ellie Ga, Dominique Ghesquière, Jacques Julien, Martin Le Chevallier, Natalia Lopez, Dominique Mahut, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Bruno Peinado, Steven Pennaneac’h, Abraham Poincheval, Hugues Reip, Pascal Rivet, Benjamin Rivière, Éric Thomas, Gurvan Tymen, and Jean-Luc Verna.

Artist and filmmaker Ariane Michel was born in Paris in 1973, she lives in Paris and Esquibien, in Finistère, Brittany, France. She works on projects in which cinematic narrative techniques play a large part: videos, installations, films and performances use immersion, projection and editing techniques to offer the viewer a singular space-time experience.

Her works have been acquired by the MAM Paris, the Centre Pompidou, the National Contemporary Art Collection, and have been exhibited at the Nuits Blanches in Paris (2009 & 2010); the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (solo show 2010); the Atelier at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Minsheng Museum, Shanghai; Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York; and the Aichi Triennial, Japan. They have also been screened at FID, the international film festival in Marseilles (Grand Prix 2006) and at the festivals in Locarno, Rotterdam, Vancouver and Lisbon.

Curators: Sophie Kaplan, director of La Criée

La Rhétorique des marées is coproduced by Ariane Michel, A Perte de Vue and La Criée centre of contemporary art,
with the support of Frac Bretagne, région Bretagne, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Drac Bretagne – ministère de la Culture et de la Communication and agnès b. endowment fund.