Forma viva 2021: Finissage |
Saturday, 16th of October 2021 |
5 pm, presentation of the final results of the sculputres |
6 pm, official conclusion, congratulatory speech, Video projection by artist Vincent Ceraudo
Les statues meurent aussi, Chris Marker
Paris City Ghost, Vincent Ceraudo
Piran Coastal Galleries have decided to celebrate the conclusion of this year's solemn edition of the jubilee sculptural symposium Forma Viva 1961-2021 by inviting the French artist Vincent Ceraudo to participate. In the spirit of the theme of this year's edition, which is dedicated to connecting art and nature, a tour of the park with bicycles, Bike-in, will be organized, which will be a kind of ecological reinterpretation of outdoor drive-in cinemas from the 1960s.
It will start at 5 pm at the sculpture site on Seča. In the presence of Mara Ambrožič Verderber, director of the Coastal Galleries Piran, dr. Majda Božeglav Japelj, curator of OGP, and representatives of coastal municipalities, sponsors and other collaborators, the artists will present their sculptural creations. Visitors will be able to take a closer look at the works of Max Seibald, Alberto Scodro, Jure Markota and Mario Lopes or take a walk around the park.
At 6 pm, we will officially conclude the symposium event right at the work site with a short congratulatory speech from the Mayor of the Municipality of Piran.
This will be followed by a video projection on a specially designed macro canvas in the sculpture park (Linder area). Vincent Ceraudo's original video, Paris City Ghost, and Les statues meurent aussi, shot in 1953 by internationally acclaimed authors Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, will be presented. Both works, despite the time lag, are in dialogue with each other and celebrate the relationship to sculpture, architecture and landscape in connection to man and modern society.
Video program
Les statues meurent aussi (1953), Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Ghislain Cloquet, video, 30 minutes. Courtesy Présence Africaine, Paris.
“When humans are dead, they become part of history. When statues are dead, they become part of art. This botany of death is what we call culture.” The first sentences of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ work perfectly encompass the meaning of the whole video. Commissioned in 1950 by Presence Africaine, Les statues meurent aussi, tells how statues, which have always been considered as still and inanimate objects, carry their own materiality, and should thus be regarded as living beings, having their own life cycle. Filtered by the gaze of the camera, the sculptures start coming alive, and through the admirable work of the two directors, they are connected to the social context and the visual culture they are part of, opening to new meanings and contemporary interpretations. This is one of the first works of Chris Marker, who will stand out as a reference point of the French New Wave, together with his colleague Alain Resnais.
Paris City Ghost (2015), Vincent Ceraudo, 4k video, 5’55 minutes.
In 2015, Vincent Ceraudo discovers by chance the existence of a perfect replica of Paris located in the suburbs of Hangzhou, an architectonic project that combines surrealism, post-modernism and utopian dreams, 11.000 km away from the French capital. Through the assistance of a drone, which associates the aesthetics of aerial photography with the sense of anxiety produced by the surveillance systems, the author films the most fascinating corners of the city, highlighting the physical and psychological limits of this architecture. The video enquires the double nature of this ghost city: on one hand its surreal replication of an existing city, on the other hand an open window towards a dystopic future, desert and deserted, in which the author sees a future version of himself wandering without a proper destination.
