26 January – 25 March 2007

France, Spain, Portugal, Scotland

Jocelyn Cottencin

born in 1967 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Rennes, France

For the 2005-2006 cycle, La Criée has invited Jocelyn Cottencin to create an artistic project on the idea of the circulation between and stays in the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao in Spain, Lisbon and Porto in Portugal and Glasgow in the United Kingdom.

Jocelyn Cottencin’s artistic project starts from the simple idea of being open to elsewhere. To walk at random is to experience unknown paths and as opposed to linear itineraries it may lead to more unexpected and rich encounters. It also implies the readiness to leave the habits of movement behind, the rituals of work which can sometimes enclose spaces into too rigid borders. As a metaphor of circulation and exchange, Just a Walk raises the essential questions of territory, as much in its reality as in the images it generates:

• The desire to circulate generated by the project Just a Walk does not imply a desire to meet the other in order to define an ideal or uniform territory. Just a Walk is a project where friction, difference and contradiction all have a place. To provoke meetings and openings is a true personal and political commitment towards and with the other. It is to take the risk of tension and rupture but also that of construction and the possible.

• Just a Walk is an artistic project which will put into focus the notion of territory itself, from the conception of the project through its various research declinations right through to its public showing. Jocelyn Cottencin will, in fact, offer:

  A time for public visibility with an exhibition and a choreographic event in Rennes.

• Art projects: Some are already in place, others need to be developed according to the progress of Just a Walk. These artistic proposals include both individual productions of the artist (Short stories in Europe, Masse…) as well as an appeal to other artists to produce and create new works.

• Specific work modalities: Research and meetings with contemporary art professionals and artists ; research and production residences abroad ; research workshops with other artists and theoreticians in Rennes…

As a metaphor of circulation and exchange, Just a Walk raises the essential questions of territory, as much in its reality as in the images it generates:

• How to cross a territory?

• Is a territory made of normative identities or is it a product of the imagination within a flow of fluctuant and contradictory desires

• Could a territory not originate from a movable and extensible length according to various different configurations?

• How to think of territory with the onset of globalisation?

• Has territory anything to see with margin and center?

• Can I experience territory through the vital space which I am allowed, by myself or by others, to live in?

• Is territory a matter of negotiation from a collectivity to share?

• And if territory were finally only a belief matter, a necessary utopia?

Latifa Laâbissi

born in 1964 in Grenoble, France
lives and works in Brittany, France

scenography

Nadia Lauro

Habiter

From March 5th to 9th  
Performances at inhabitants’ home and creation of movies 

From March 16th to April 21st 
Screening sessions at inhabitants’ home 

Latifa Laâbissi propose, pour le projet Habiter, un solo dans un espace quotidien, ou plus précisément chez les habitants d’une ville. Pour ce, elle a mis en place un protocole. Après un repérage, une dérive, qui lui permet de choisir un quartier (sans s’arrêter sur des populations type), elle diffuse une petite annonce dans les journaux locaux et sur des panneaux prévus à cet effet dans quelques magasins :

« Artiste chorégraphe recherche un habitant qui accepterait d’accueillir chez lui un projet de danse. La proposition est gratuite et nécessite deux heures de disponibilité. Pour plus de renseignements, vous pouvez contacter le 06 … »

Suite à une première rencontre téléphonique, lors de laquelle elle décrit son intention et sa manière de procéder, Latifa Laâbissi se rend chez l’hôte de sa danse. Après un échange et une visite de l’habitation, ils choisissent l’espace qui accueillera le corps de la chorégraphe (la salle à manger, un couloir, etc.). En ce temps, elle observe la manière qu’a son hôte d’ouvrir son intimité, sa « maison », son « chez lui » à un étranger et de lui céder un espace pour le recevoir. Sans rien changer à son agencement, elle s’attarde alors dans cet espace, l’investit, et laisse à son hôte le soin de décider d’assister ou non au déploiement de sa proposition.

Latifa Laâbissi est accompagnée de Sophie Laly et de Jocelyn Cottencin. Les films et les photographies réalisés constituent matière pour la suite du projet. Des séances de visionnage sont prévues chez certains des habitants, pour les regarder ensemble, c’est-à-dire une rencontre entre l’équipe artistique, les habitants et leurs invités, un moment commun et une conversation autour de cette expérience.

Pour Habiter à Rennes, Latifa Laâbissi invite Nadia Lauro à concevoir un espace pour La Criée, qui deviendra un potentiel de fiction, un espace à habiter par le public. Latifa Laâbissi pense également ce projet avec des architectes et des théoriciens.

I Hear Voices de Nadia Lauro est une sorte de paysage en fourrure avec un environnement sonore, à investir durant toute la durée de l’exposition. C’est un espace immersif, entre « jardin mental » et« salle d’échauffement pour public », qui sera scénarisé de façon spécifique pour générer des manières de voir et d’être ensemble inédites.

16 May 2008 will see the opening of the first Ateliers de Rennes – biennial of Contemporary Art. Instigated by Art Norac, the corporate sponsorship association of the Norac agribusiness group, the first biennial, titled Shared Values, has been designed and organised by the Art To Be association.

Symbolic of the relationship between art and business, the event focuses in particular on the creation of value, a matter of concern to both artists and companies in terms of their output. To mark the occasion, Art To Be and La Criée are inviting artist Gianni Motti, known for his distinctive vision of the way work functions.

Unique in their field, Motti’s works take the form of one-off operations, most often outside the art world as such. The results are artistic propositions having to do with simple but radical acts, or exhibitions enabling the introduction of “spanner in the works” visual elements that modify or disturb the functioning of an art institution and, by extension, the public’s reception of the works on show.

From acting out his own death in July 1989 to claiming responsibility for the California earthquake of 1992, Motti reveals a genius for subversion and appropriation of everyday events. In May 2005 he made a descent into 27 kilometre underground ring of the CERN particle accelerator and walked its entire length in the name of art – a serious contrast with the movement of particles being projected at the speed of light.

His La Criée exhibition at the Ateliers de Rennes Biennial will comprise two works. The first is a Minimalist installation in the Art Centre, where over 17,000 loose cobblestones will cover the entire floor area. The absence of pointing will make the surface – and the visitors walking on it – unstable, so that both are on edge. At once dense, solid, sober, precarious and slightly wobbly, the installation raises a number of contemporary issues such as lack of commitment and ambient uncertainty. It also questions the place of the artist and the art centre in the context of the work ethic.

Motti’s artistic agenda has more to do with discussion and speculation than with unrestrained productivity, and the installation is a brilliant illustration of his stance: while harking back to the events of May 1968, this is not a work of remembrance or militancy, but rather an interrogative venture in which the artist dispenses with symbolic and conceptual gambits and injects new life into the workings of critical thinking.

The second work involves the activation of a Gianni Motti Assistant who will walk the streets of Rennes wearing a yellow T-shirt inscribed with the words “Gianni Motti Assistant” in black. Associated with this figure are a number of photographs, of which one will circulate widely via the post, drops, and the Internet. The photograph shows an actual encounter between the “Gianni Motti Assistant” and the “Municipal Police”. The appearance of various such Assistants all over the world activates the artist’s presence without actually revealing their true mission – to act as signs, and to interact according to the context and the Assistant’s degree of commitment within the environment concerned.

For his show Think Tank at La Criée, Gianni Motti produced a radical installation within the art centre: 17 000 cobblestones, not united, are covering all of La Criée’s ground surface. The absence of juncture composes a floating ground and conferes to the visitor a feeling of instability while he/she strolling around the space.

Work and public are standing on the edge. Dense, solid but also sober, precarious and slightly unsteady, the installation puts into question different topics such as the absence of commitment, the prevailing and necessary uncertainty in a global context. The work plays on the paradox between naked walls which generate a feeling of vacuum and the ground saturated by cobblestones, paradox revealing the missing of critical thought.

The installation also questions the places of the artist and the art institution regarding the meaning and practice of working. Indeed, Gianni Motti wanted to produce this piece as a radical opposite to the productivity in art object and industry. Motti’s artistic agenda has more to do with discussion and speculation than with unrestrained productivity, and the installation is a brilliant illustration of his stance: while harking back to the events of May 1968, this is not a work of remembrance or militancy, but rather an interrogative venture in which the artist dispenses with symbolic and conceptual gambits and injects new life into the workings of critical thinking.

Carole Brulard

An architect by profession, François Seigneur works via an atypical overlapping of visual art and architecture. Combining painting, installations, graphic design, exhibition design and architecture, he practises a philosophy of the “open-ended” work: never definitive and often tweaked.

His exhibition at La Criée focuses on the fabrication of disorder as both a necessary concept and an indispensable creative act; and this in a post-global era in which control, an obsession with security, and systems of assessment infiltrate the least discursive, administrative, social and even artistic system. This is why François Seigneur’s work stresses the need for architecture and the visual arts to risk addressing areas of habitat and of forms, objects and concepts usually dismissed as not very “sexy”, insufficiently “formulated” or too “disorderly”. For it is in these areas that life and creativity often surface. La Criée is presenting a randomly structured Grey Macro-monochrome whose system of rearrangeable plywood panels triggers changes of aspect in the course of the exhibition. In contrast with this work, the installation Lucky There’s Advertising clutters the space with consumer (and consumed) items. In the small room the exhibition is rounded off with an architectural model titled So as not to die, I won’t finish my house. So why finish other people’s? As François Seigneur puts it, “Order and disorder are relative, complementary, indissociable states. Whether geometrical, temporal or human, they run our societies. If order within order leads to authoritarianism, unrestrained disorder leads to anarchy. The exhibition offers three possible states.