Royal Garden 4 — Rivières — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 1 → December 31, 2013

Crédac’s internet site Royal Garden is a virtual multidisciplinary multimedia review that has been online since 2008. A virtual-world extension of Crédac’s mission as an art venue, Royal Garden is a critical, theoretical and artistic exquisite corpse. With each new issue of the review, a curatorial committee is invited to take over the space and invite a number of artists and theoreticians in turn, each of whom is asked to propose a specific intervention (new texts or images, videos, slideshows, graphic explorations, games, etc.)

This fourth installment has been entrusted to Didier Rittener, who invited Federica Martini to join him. The installment envisions rivers as both motif and model, echoing an earlier exhibition at Crédac, Le Travail de Rivière (The Work of the River), which was mounted in 2009. Rivers wear away and make memory visible. Royal Garden 4: Rivers includes works in the fine arts, sound, film and literature that form an open continuum, a series of possible imaginary actions.

At the outset of this project there is a list (reproduced on the following page). After taking part in Le Travail de Rivière, Rittener indeed began compiling a list of works in the visual arts, music and literature that refer to rivers, like some endless task of getting back to the beginning, the origin. This work of returning to, reviving and extending a past exhibition is fairly rare and joins up with the ideal, labyrinthine form of Royal Garden. Rittener opted for subjectivity over exhaustiveness and his list was brought to an end with the help of Federica Martini. It also became the invitation that was extended to those taking part in Royal Garden 4, the “riverbed,” as it were.

This list is also the first of twenty iterations of Royal Garden 4, whose dynamic interactive interface suggests a stream at the surface of which the various individual projects flow off in a random fashion.