“Avec le vent…”

Proposed by Nico Dockx and Cari Gonzalez-Casanova

Nico Dockx & Jan Mast, Alexis Gautier, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova, Heide Hinrichs, Karl Holmqvist, Ann Veronica Janssens, Zak Kyes & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pat McCarthy, Jonas Mekas, Philip Metten, Jean-Michel Meyers, Maurizio Nannucci, Ouragan, Anri Sala, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Luca Vitone.

 

Date : Saturday, September 5 and Sunday, September 13

 

 

Venue : group exhibition on the sea, visible from the Marseille coast.

 

Limited places on the sailboats can be bought for those who want to experience this one-day voyage on the Mediterranean Sea together with some of the artists. Your participation helps the production, click : here to sign in for one of the 25 places still available.

 

“Avec le vent…” is a work in public space that has been initiated and developed as a prototype version in 2015-2016 by Belgian artist Nico Dockx in close collaboration with some local sailors of the Société Nautique de Marseille as well as colleague artist Cari Gonzalez-Casanova, and which took place in the form of two sailing trips on the Mediterranean Sea around end of August and early September 2016 departing from Le Vieux-Port de Marseille.

 

For this work in public space, seventeen friends/ Artists were invited to design 16 sails especially for this event : Nico Dockx & Jan Mast, Alexis Gautier, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova, Heide Hinrichs, Karl Holmqvist, Ann Veronica Janssens, Zak Kyes & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pat McCarthy, Jonas Mekas, Philip Metten, Jean-Michel Meyers, Maurizio Nannucci, Ouragan, Anri Sala, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Luca Vitone.

 

For Manifesta 13 Les Parallèles du Sud, these sixteen works travel with the wind and create an experimental group exhibition at sea, entitled Avec le vent… This experimental group exhibition at sea can be viewed and experienced by visitors of Art-o-rama and Manifesta 13, and the inhabitants of Marseille, for free from different points of views: the departure and arrival at Le  Vieux-Port, along the coast-line,… The voyage will be documented and a publication will be produced afterwards. Different mediation platforms are envisioned so as to encourage exchange and discussions around the themes of the project. At the FRAC PACA, another one of our partners, a talk and film projection is envisioned. Through all of our partners, we hope to create platforms to engage with a larger audience and to provide more or less perennial experiences depending on the media. “Avec le vent…” is an exercise in trying to reflect upon (as well as to rethink) existing formats of exhibition making and especially our fixed frames of perception. As everything is on the move during such a voyage at sea it is very difficult (and, even impossible) to grasp the project as a whole. You can only experience bits and parts of the event which you are participating within —whether on board of one of the eight sailboats, standing at the quay along Le Vieux-Port de Marseille, somewhere along the coast-line of the city or in the neighboring port town of Cassis. As many points of observation as there are points of view (informed by culture, memory, social position, mediated and inherited experience, etc…) The work is something that you have to reconstruct through conversation and sharing your personal points of view with one another. The financial model of “Avec le vent…” also contributes to the projects focus on the value of experience. Despite the fact that the sails are designed by artists that represent a certain art market value, the sails as objects and the experience of the voyage resist commoditization. To ensure that the focus remains on the experience, all of the funds that will be received will go into the production of the sails, the logistics of the project and the documentation of it. The artists have participated graciously and a contract has been made with the sailors to ensure that the sails are not sold. Places on the boats can be bought for those who want to participate in the voyage and share the experience with the sailors and some of the artists. The “collector” pays for his/her experience as a sort of patron, but does not own anything in exchange. He/she becomes a collaborator, part of the project that aims to create friendly bridges between the people of Marseille (the sailors and spectators), the artists, and art institutions.The choice of the Mediterranean Sea, an important geographical element that characterizes Marseille, was inspired by both by the actual place and the symbolic one. It is the road to freedom for some, an economic tool for others, a source of poetry, an environmental debacle, a complex world of biodiversity, a tourist and commercial highway, a bridge between cultures, an impenetrable border, a catalyst for intercultural exchange and an advocate for divide.

Nico Dockx

 

Nico Dockx (Belgium 1974) works as a visual artist, curator, publisher and researcher with a fundamental interest in archives. His interventions, publications, texts, sounds, images, installations, performances and conversations —which are usually the result of collaboration with other artists— embody the relation-ship between perception and memory, which he interprets differently each time. His work has won him a DAAD grant in Berlin (2005), and various prizes like Le Prix Jeune Peinture Belge —the Emile & Stephy Langui prize (2009, together with Helena Sidiropoulos). Since 1998 he has exhibited his work at home and abroad and has published more than forty artist’s publications with his own independent imprint Curious.

 

Cari Gonzalez-Casanova

 

Cari Gonzalez-Casanova (Puerto Rico 1971) grew up in New York and currently works between France and New York. Through her research-based work and collaborative projects, Cari Gonzalez-Casanova examines different strategies of representation, and their use of seduction or authority, to question the politi-cal, utopian or dystopian ambitions that motivate them. In 2016 she published a book on strategies of camouflage and will be participating in the exhibition « Camouflage. Au-delà du motif abstrait (art, nature, guerre) » at the Felix Art Museum in Drogenbos, Belgium (exhibition in collaboration with the War Her-itage Institute et l’Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique). She is recipient of the following grants : Mecènes du Sud (2013), the Conseil Régional PACA (2010, 2013), and La Ville de Marseille (2013). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museo del Barrio in New York and the FRAC PACA (France). She is represented by mfc-michele didier (Paris, Bruxelles)