Musée de Confluences-Lyon 2010
The project
The plan under its air full of dust of abandonment, the building of the Natural history museum of Lyons which Émile Guimet made construct in 1878 has ghostly air. It is there, in these walls, that I accomplish an installation with the Museum of the Confluences, which patiently, waits for the opening of its new areas between Saône river and Rhône river. On course for my workshop, across the deserted rooms, I greet a prehistoric marine animal, the skeleton of a Cervidae, bones broken up by a whale and a seated with straw giraffe, left for count in the vast space which was one time an ice rink: it is necessary to say that a refrigerated society had bought back places at the beginning of the years 19OO and extended them before leaving them in its turn to leave place in the Natural history museum in 1914. I arrive finally under the glass roof of my temporary working place, on the last floor of this extension; his metallic joist framing gives him industrial paces which I like, contrasting with the outside skin of the building, proud of its stony dignity of size. I feel there well, carnally.
With a team of the Museum, we made a choice in the Amazonian’s collections of objects and of naturalized animals: necklaces and instruments of and musical instruments, a mask, baskets and potteries, a tapir, hummingbirds, a toucan, an iguana and insects; they will set up in the installation which will develop on a surface on the nine-metre soil by eight and a two-metre height fifty. Through a cannon with sounds, through a transducer and through a panel plan (experimentation of the Institute Érasme), sounds picked up in nature and music composed by my friend and compositor Philippe Forget will be cast; four monitors videos will show short wildlife or ethnographic films and extracts of his "Amazonian" Opera Awatsihu in the middle of whole about sixty square metres of painting which I accomplish under the roofs of the Museum.
This space in a way idealized must show and to hear the Amazonian forest questionings, to suggest on the living being and the inanimate, the real and the representing, the imagining and the natural, conservation, the mayfly and the vulnerable. The body will fan out between objects and painting, fixed and unstable pictures, visual and auditory impressions there.
This sensory experience will be both offered to the children and to the adults and mediators will be present to point out ways of understanding but especially questioning and, I hope for it, of confusion.
Click on picture to see it in full screen
The Realization
Thanks to persons of the Museum whom I met on this plan, and particularly Sylvie and Aline hosting the publics and in charge of this project, I have a big joy in the realization of this vast whole linen about twenty. But this happiness is also owed to the so particular atmosphere, which reigns here: I like my solitary job above this space where alone some offices, workshops and reservations overflowing rare and amazing objects are still in service. Body in levitation flitting on the astounding world.
Down, sparsely lit by mean with money one illumination of assistance, I am stopped in the course of a hall close to technical workshops by a herd against - nature of around thirty animals: sides against sides, lion, zebra, white bear, aurochs, brown bear and Cervidaes are as stupefied by some curious staggering disaster; I think of a sudden glaciation to see them so congealed. My body also freezes. It is not however of a block of ice that they are prisoner, but of walls in plastic films which protect them before move. And during this time, unruffled under his ritual voile, a Muslim cleaning woman crosses the rag in a gallery to the empty windows. Here is the strange and spectral world which seems to live serenely in its careful wait, its patient postponement; this world is full of charm, so calm in its indiscernible order, where everything, not to doubt it, is haphazardly numbered, classified, ordered, not much left.
What enchantment brought me on this strengthened island, this lost country, this rock isolated in the city?
Very up here, the Passacaille of Biber which I listen to almost in a continuous loop during this stay leads me mysteriously in a parenthesis of the same order, the world keeping its breath, hanging, brought forward: above this shady continent, in the zenithal light of the workshop, so changeable, so capricious, even-tempered and frenetic, I am very busy: it is because it is necessary me to meet the deadlines of this short and intense residence. On the soil of the workshop, the two-metre clothes fifty high by a metre or a metre fifty broad fill up little by little with foliages and with animals, macaws, frogs, snakes, toucans, butterflies, monkeys or ants. I paint especially in dish, in a gradation going of the black of painting to the white of the virgin support, the bare feet milling on the ongoing clothes; my body measures in the painting, which is made.
Once painted, I hang some on metal beams, while scattered here and there, pots of painting, drafts on paper and the model in the 5/100th of group create a world which, it, is very habitual and familiar to me; I like it and it carries me in the countdown of the days when I has to work here.
Étienne Yver, october 2010