Month: November 2018

PLASTICUS

Exposition du 16/11/2018 au 25/01/2019

Avec Boris Achour, Rada Boukova, Baptiste Debombourg & David Marin, Pierre-Yves Hélou, Camille Henrot, Delphine Kohler & Les Filles du Facteur, Eric Monin, la Plastic Bank, les étudiants de l’ENSAPLV.

Le projet Plasticus est né de la collaboration entre Rada Boukova, artiste invitée en 2018, et Baptiste Debombourg enseignant en art à L’ENSAPLV. L’exposition est une toile de fond pour un projet de recherche plus large, développé en atelier.

Cette exposition autour du sac plastique aborde le problème de son envahissement du fait de sa production de masse et donc la pollution engendrée. Elle propose une réflexion sur l’usage, le détournement, le recyclage de cet objet dans l’art contemporain, le design, l’architecture, l’histoire, l’économie ou la mode. Véritable atelier de recherche ouvert sur l’imagination, l’objectif est de proposer des pistes pour transformer et recycler ce matériau. Marqueur spatio-temporel de notre civilisation, basique, original, banal ou sophistiqué, le sac fait partie de notre quotidien depuis les années 1960 environ. Devenu un objet universel, il n’en demeure pas moins un matériau pourvu d’un immense potentiel tout autant qu’il est devenu un fléau pour l’environnement.

L’idée de cette exposition est un élan vers une autre direction : commençons par rêver et bricoler pour engager une autre manière de faire.

For more information on Baptiste Debombourg please click here.

The Permian Projects

The Natural History Museum is a place where life and death mingle, where to celebrate life, we kill, a place where the variety of life can only be appreciated dead. The Permian was one of the most biodiverse periods in the history of Earth but ended with the worst mass extinction. In the regional museum in Perm, even more than in any other museum of natural history, life and death coexist.

These projects are conceived as artistic interventions into the existing museum practices, drawing ways of working, aesthetics and conceptual frameworks from the institution itself.

The Permian Collection

The Permian Collection is a collection of the insects exterminated as part of Perm Regional Museum’s conservation efforts.

These are regularly exterminated and disposed of without much afterthought. Focused on the nature-out-there, the Museum fails to consider itself as a place overrun by living beings, some of which might work against its stated mission of heritage conservation.

At artist’s request, the Museum began collecting the insect it kills, rounding up in half a year over 200 from 35 different families of Arthropoda. The new collection includes butterflies, mosquitos but also spiders and woodlice. The collected insects have been scientifically defined with the support of entomologists of Perm University, catalogued, photographed and placed in custom-made boxes, becoming the first new entomology collection since 2008.

The Dioramas of the Permian Museum

The Dioramas of the Permian Museum is a tridimensional photo series portraying the zoological collection’s animals in their new habitat: the museum storage.

Since the 1960s, the Perm Regional Museum used to have several dioramas in its displays. After moving venue in 2007, these were dismantled and their parts put into storage. The taxidermied animals that were part of them currently inhabit a former office, crowded in unlikely combinations that span biotopes and predator-prey relationships.

Many of these animals, collected when they were typical for the region, have become endangered. Some have gone extinct. The biotopes that the dioramas’ painted backgrounds depicted have in many cases ceased to exist. For many of the animals in the Museum’s Zoological collection, the storage itself has become their natural habitat, the only place they can still be found.

Axel Straschnoy’s work has been supported by a State Grant for Artists from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. His residency at the museum was supported by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation. The projects were co-produced by the Perm Regional Museum and Kolme Perunaa.

For further information on Axel Straschnoy, please click here.