Emma Lavigne has been Managing Director, since 2021, of the Pinault Collection and its three museums: the Palazzo Grassi, the Punta della Dogana, in Venice, and the Bourse de Commerce, in Paris.
An art historian, she has curated landmark exhibitions, such as "Elles", "Christian Marclay", "The Clock" and "Pierre Huyghe"
,
organized at the Center Pompidou in Paris. .
"Before the storm", presented at the Bourse de Commerce, is one of those: against a backdrop of climate change, it encourages the viewer to change their perspective.
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Miss Figaro.
–
“
Before the storm
”
: is the title of the exhibition a warning?
Emma
Lavine.
– We are at the same time before the storm, during the storm, after the storm… It is a warning, an invitation to awareness.
It also means that there is still time to change some things.
The sun can come back just after the storm.
It's a metaphor that shows how shadow and light can cohabit in our relationship to nature, to the living landscape.
We are not only in the shadows: new shoots can sprout.
In video, Chanel exhibition: Marion Cotillard and Carole Bouquet at the microphone of Madame Figaro
So there is hope?
This is what the American anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “the third nature”.
According to her, making worlds is not just for humans, the stories between species are intertwined.
Like these Japanese mushrooms,
matsutake,
which grow in altered areas, soils degraded by human activity.
Like other forms of life, man must come together to survive, he is not alone in the world.
We are no longer in a romantic or hierarchical relationship with nature.
This osmosis of man and his environment has been hollowed out.
New forms of beauty may exist in this world, which must be taken care of with great urgency.
We must think about new modes of contemplation.
Emma Lavigne
(here at the Bourse de Commerce)
has been Managing Director, since 2021, of Pinault Collection.
Maxime Tetard
"In the staircase resounds the sound of a tropical rain of which we do not see the slightest drop"
La Rotonde is taken over by the artist Danh Vo. What does it present?
Tadao Ando's concrete cylinder in the Rotunda will become a dark garden.
Under the huge glass roof, the architecture of the Bourse de Commerce appears as a kind of greenhouse in which Danh Vo has imagined a mutating landscape where he intertwines, as often in his work, different stories.
He uses the trunks and branches of trees that have been struck down, uprooted or weakened by bad weather, supporting them with wooden structures to restore their verticality.
He invents hybridizations between nature and culture, by grafting sculptures and objects to this devastated forest.
What work will be placed on the stairs?
In the staircase resounds the sound of a tropical rain of which we do not see the slightest drop.
We hear the water flowing as in
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
by Gabriel García Márquez.
This sound work,
Raining
(2012), generates a climate, an attention.
Rain is very frequent in the work of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
It will rain from February to September, reflecting our climate concerns...
What do you present of
Pierre Huyghe
?
A Way in Untilled
restores the fallow ground, a compost, a chaotic excrescence that depicts the world as it is experienced by non-humans, from insects to dogs.
Pierre Huyghe has established himself as one of the major figures in the questioning of relationships with non-humans in art.
This video work is a space-time in the making, it opens the breach to new rites to share the condition of plants and all the living things that surround us.
In this film, we can follow the peregrinations of the dog called Human, the staging of bees, rodents, other forms of life… It is the laissez-faire that interests the artist.
Read alsoDavid Hockney retrospective: “The sharpness of his gaze is of a rigor that goes almost to cruelty”
Is it important to change your point of view?
The question of point of view and perspective is essential.
All artists who try to get closer to the living have the common denominator of taking a less anthropocentric view of the world.
The human is not at the center of all other forms of life.
Each artist in the exhibition has invested the space we have entrusted to them like a landscape.
Some works are environments.
A large room is devoted to the American artist Diana Thater, who is one of the pioneers on the issues of ecology.
We show
Chernobyl
(2011), which was filmed in an area around the plant.
The device plunges the spectator into the heart of the irradiated architecture, in immersion.
This soiled space is returned to wild life: horses are free there, for example… We balance between ecological disaster and the force of life.
“Artists transcend threats”
You are showing a masterpiece from the Pinault collection,
Coronation of Sesostris (part III),
2000, by Cy Twombly…
It is an emblematic work, a variation on the pharaoh's mystical journey and the race for the sun.
The series also depicts the transition from day to night.
Cy Twombly's cycle dialogues with works by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, a few twigs, simple little cut-out leaves, which testify to the great fragility of the world, and are placed by the artist in unstable situations, suspended between thin threads.
Like Cy Twombly's sun, they seem to be constantly changing.
Each artist in the exhibition has invested the space we have entrusted to them like a landscape
Emma Lavigne
Another immersion, that offered by Hicham Berrada...
The video installation
Présage
(2018) immerses the viewer in a mutant universe.
The artist invents new forms of beauty.
Metals and waste are immersed in an aquarium and, under the action of toxic substances, are transformed and seem to come to life like a coral reef
Aren't many works bordering on beauty and danger?
Artists transcend threats, invent new real or imaginary territories, possible rebirths.
We are taken in a cycle, a kind of immense choreography.
We should almost consider that there are no longer four seasons but now more, each allowing us to reinvent our relationship to the world, to the climate.
What interests me is not only to show works, but to offer the public new experiences of art.
"Before the storm", a season around the works of the Pinault Collection, until September 11, at the Bourse de Commerce, in Paris.
pinaultcollection.com
