DIGEST
LA PERMANENCE
23 September–22 November 2014
Musée de la danse
St Melaine, 38 rue Saint-Melaine – CS 20831
35108 Rennes cedex 3
France
with the Centre national des arts plastiques
DIGEST is the fourth and final chapter of LA PERMANENCE—a year-long arts program devoted to performance and the relationship between art and dance—presented from September 23 to November 22, at the Musée de la danse in Rennes (France).
DIGEST focuses on the integration of organic textures into art, as well as on the concept of eating as an act of creation, following Boris Charmatz‘s new work manger, in which the mouth is a crossroads where food, voices, breath, words, and saliva intermix.
Michel Blazy has transformed the entrance of Musée de la danse into an organic path in which the viewer can smell, hear, and see the food left to rot, gradually loosing vitality, and decomposing throughout the duration of the exhibition.
In his videos, EAT and My Lunch with Anna, the choreographer Alain Buffard addresses the ritual and social dimensions of the act of eating, using food in order to stir up trouble—somewhere between cannibalism and the redefinition of one’s identity. In the video Another Pa amb tomàquet, the artist and choreographer La Ribot offers a course in total cuisine, with a very personal version of the Catalan recipe for tomato bread.
The London-based graphic designer group Åbäke has changed the little studio of the Musée de la danse into a living room where one may see an installation of new productions of culinary objects titled Jumeaux (twins) and produced in collaboration with the Rennes School of Fine Arts. Visitors can also see a vernacular collection of tools related to personal stories into a refrigerated food shop display case, as well as view a screening of a movie made within the same environment. Åbäke used the time period of the exhibition to produce a movie, from the casting, to the shooting, of My Lunch with Bianca, which will premiere in the space where it was created. This movie completes a fictional trilogy of films elaborated by the collective My Breakfast with Blassie, with Andy Kaufmann and My dinner with André, by Louis Malle, will now be joined by My lunch with Bianca.
Last but not least, Åbäke invited visitors to an interactive brunch experience on October 18. People were welcome to eat a meal based on the plot of My Breakfast with Blassie and watch the movie at the same time. This event is part of Åbäke’s ongoing performance series called SOCIAL PASTA, which focuses on the dichotomies of eating and speaking, eating and watching. The series shows how lunches unwittingly give rise to specific gestures of the body, in addition to provoking very stimulating work conversations or love confessions, or even creating a strange atmosphere…
LA PERMANENCE is a year-long project developed for the year 2014 by the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Musée de la danse/Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne (Rennes, France). Divided into four thematic parts, LA PERMANENCE aims to reflect, and distort, the current questions underlying the fields of visual arts and performance arts. Visual masterpieces selected from the CNAP collections and featured at the Musée de la danse rely on a combination of physical, material, and performative gestures, generated either by the artist or by the public, in the spirit of Alan Kaprow, who believed in “art as life.”
Act One of LA PERMANENCE was devoted to the idea of a reenactment of the body, featuring works by Joachim Koester, Aernout Mik, Edouard Levé, Tino Sehgal, and Absalon and it also included an international symposium. Act Two was oriented towards storytelling and visual poetry, with works by Dora Garcia, John Giorno, Jean Dupuy, César Vayssié, presented with a reenactement of the project Do it by Hans Ulrich Obrist performed by Claudia Triozzi, Marlène Saldana, and Yaïr Barelli, to name a few. Act Three was dedicated to children, with a selection of dance photography and videos created by artists such as Teun Hocks, Robin Rhode, Hicham Benohoud, Pierre Leguillon, and a group of eight guide-dancers who accompanied the public and assisted in the interpretation of the artworks featured in the exhibition.
The year-long project will conclude on November 22 in the city of Rennes, just after the French premiere of manger by Boris Charmatz at the Théâtre National de Bretagne (on November 18). The concluding event will take place in the public space of the Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle, from 2 to 6 pm, and it will showcase performances The viewers by Carole Douillard and Kiss by Tino Sehgal.
Project conceived by: Boris Charmatz, director of the Musée de la danse; Sandra Neuveut, deputy director of the Musée de la danse; and Sébastien Faucon, curator of visual arts collections at the Centre national des arts plastiques.
Centre national des arts plastiques (French National Centre for Visual Arts – CNAP)
The missions of the Centre national des arts plastiques are to support and promote contemporary artistic creation. It is responsible for the national contemporary art collection, or Fonds national d’art contemporain, which it enriches, conserves and promotes, both inside and outside France. One of the CNAP’s missions is to loan and exhibit works from the collection both in France and internationally.
