From & To
Sébastien Rémy & Cyril Verde: A Company That Makes Everything
November 9, 2014–January 19, 2015
Opening: November 8, 6pm
Villa Arson – National Contemporary Art Centre
20 avenue Stephen Liégeard
06105 Nice Cedex 2
France
Hours: Wednesday–Monday 2–6pm
Free admission
Artists in From & To: Diane Blondeau, Lorraine Châteaux, Quentin Derouet, Tony Fiorentino, Julia Frank, Sonia Leimer, Roberto Pugliese, Vivien Roubaud, Leander Schwazer and Thomas Teurlai
The Villa Arson feature simultaneously two exhibitions anchored in collaboratives practices.
A Company that Makes Everything
A fictional firm created by Warner Bros., ACME Corporation is best known for its appearances in the cartoon series Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. The firm can deliver any kind of device to Wile E. Coyote in a remarkably short time: explosive tennis balls, pills generating earthquakes, seeds for growing snow clouds…Faithful to its acronym, ACME is indeed A Company that Makes Everything.
The ACME project began in 2011, developed by Sébastien Rémy & Cyril Verde in various formats: installations, conferences, screenings, guided tours… Each of these occurrences is based on the notions of mobility (physical or mental), of cinematography and of the transmission of knowledge. For the exhibition the artists produced a series of works that complement each other. The first work is an atlas using the entire surface of the walls, made of images and texts taken from a body of documents that the artists have been collecting for several years. Each element is drawn in chalk directly on the black wall. The second work is a concave screen whose fabric was handmade in wool by a community of women living in Tristan da Cunha, one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world. In a porous coming and going between the exhibition space and a place of simulacrum, a film is shown portraying a character that can be found in flesh and bone in the exhibition. On the floor, covering a wall-to-wall carpet that retraces the making of the ACME project, the crates that were used for transporting the works have become a stage set and furniture for visitors. Guided tours are based on stories of various lengths, proposed by the artists themselves. The length of each story is determined by how long it takes to prepare the various types of coffee offered. This sampling makes it possible to return to the components of the exhibition and to integrate the visitors in a shared fiction.
In the project titled From & To, five Italian artists and five French artists were invited to conceive an exhibition throughout 2013 and 2014 through meetings, workshops and exchanges. Since then the artists have worked both individually and in groups. The artistic directors of both institutions (Valerio Deho and Éric Mangion) chose not to impose any particular theme or constraint, preferring to give free rein to their creativity and to the specific works that were originally chosen according to the variety of their practices.
All of the works were produced specifically for the exhibition. Thus the Villa Arson will become an in vivo production studio. Everything will come together on site, the way in which the works will confront each other, creating links or not. It is a gamble with ten young artists on the value of exchange, cross-fertilization and freedom.
The second stage of the exhibition will be held between February 7 and April 12, 2015 at the Kunst Meran Merano Arte (Italy).
With the support of Jeanne Zéler (Brussels) and La Station (Nice) and with the collaboration of Malongo Foundation.
From & To is a part of PIANO, a platform for contemporary art, France—Italy 2014–2015, initiated by d.c.a. / a French association for the development of art centers, in partnership with the Institut Français in Italy, the French Embassy in Italy and the Institut Français, supported by the Ministry of foreign affairs and of international development, the Ministry of culture and communication and the foundation Nuovi Mecenati.
Press contact: communication [at] villa-arson.org / T +33 (0) 4 92 07 73 91
