Travelling Natures — Collectif Ding — Synesthésie ¬ MMAINTENANT — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 6 → July 28, 2014

The exhibition Travelling Natures is the achievement of multiple residencies led in Indonesia and in France by the two artists Lyn Nékorimaté and Jean-Paul Labro. This exhibition gathers works of art made with elements gleaned on the different territories spanning the project. The exhibition presents a series of films, made most notably in Saint-Denis, in which the participants are invited to engage themselves as subjects of a collective portrait. Thus, the voice of the residents of Saint-Denis is added to those of the indonesians from Pentingsari, a volcanic village in the Java island, and of the residents of Labège, a urban city next to Toulouse.

The cultural, complex and rich wealth of Travelling Natures takes as an identifying item the world of imagination, of dreams. The spectator is invited to immerge himself into the construction of some symbolic systems, which underline the representation of communities. The exchanges between these worlds are represented by the artists through forms, videos and mainly with the sound installation Echoerrance, displayed in the Chapel of the Carmélites of the museum of art and history.

Echoerrance brings together sound recordings, spatialized in the area of the exhibition. These recordings are made up of stories of night dreams and atmospheric sounds, unfolding as an interactive “fog”, adapting itself to the visitors movements in the facilities.

The exhibition Travelling Natures invites us to stroll about in the darkness, to confront us to the spatial dimension of the sound, and to tame its perception. This free moving enables us to commute from one cultural reality to another, and to cross, despite temporal and spatial limits, the vastness of the territories of imagination and symbolism.

The two artists of the Ding Collective come from filmmaking, music and performance art. Their wish to use all these skills indiscriminately led them to collaborate with Synesthésie and Benoît Courribet, a musician and research worker at the CICM laboratory, in order to find, thanks to his research, some technical solutions to their artistic endeavor. In Saint-Denis, Echoerrance was developped by Manuel Deneu.

This innovative dimension leads us to perceive the deep changes that transform how we see the world. Ding does not use exotism nor archaism, or nostalgia. The consciously or unconsciously collected myths are inserted into the contemporary world, and contribute to its evolution. The concept of boundaries is apparent in the works of the artists, who found many ways to experiment with the vagueness this notion is now geographically and culturally associated with.

Chapelle des Carmélites — musée d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Denis — 22bis rue Gabriel Péri 93200 Saint-Denis