Starting in 2008, the Festival and the Centre national des arts plastiques, with the Ministry of Culture, have commissioned, each year, a photographer artist to create a work on the Festival d'Avignon. After Martine Locatelli, who did a series of photographs on the actor's personality, exhibited in 2009, it is Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige who have been commissioned to create a work on memory. For 2011, the photographer Stéphane Couturier is already working on the dialogue between patrimonial architecture and contemporary stagecraft.
"How do you give an account of history, of the traces and the contemporary creation of the Festival d'Avignon? The mistral, often present during the performances of the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des papes, struck us as an interesting track. The manifestations of the wind alter the shows, magnify or destroy them, but leave a lasting trace in the spectators' minds. The wind seems like a double echo: on one hand, of the theatre performance in Avignon with its specificities and, on the other, of the challenges of writing a history of live performance. Our artistic proposal consists of an installation showing a 3 meter x 2 meter photographic composition of the Cour d'honneur that acts like a translucent screen on which there is a double projection. On one side, the personal accounts of certain actors of this history of the wind, and on the other, stock images of shows during which the wind manifested itself and that have been digitally reworked to be put back into the Cour d'honneur like a passing breath, a transcendent relationship, a trace of history..."
Distribution
by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
Production
une commande du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication et du Centre national des arts plastiques
coproduction Le Fresnoy, Studio national des Arts contemporains (Tourcoing)