2024-01-09 10:49:22
Home Culture Arts-Exhibitions Contemporary art
This temporary exhibition entitled “Art In Situ” presents until January 28, 2024, the work of three local artists who offer visitors their perceptions of this place of memory.
France Télévisions – Culture Editorial
Published on 01/09/2024 09:49 Updated on 01/09/2024 10:14
Reading time: 3 min “Art in Situ” exhibition at the Rivesaltes camp memorial (Pyrénées-Orientales) (FRANCE 3 OCCITANIE)
How can we bring life to a place that has experienced the horror of deportation and internment? It is from this question that Philippe Domergue, Nicolas Cussac and Nissrine Seffar approached the history of the Rivesaltes camp (Pyrénées-Orientales). The three visual artists present their works in resonance with the place until January 28, 2024. Images, installations or intimate drawings, the stroll offers visions and techniques specific to each of the artists.
Expo au camp de Rivesaltes Expo au camp de Rivesaltes – (France 3 Languedoc-Roussillon: J. Taurinya / C. Llambrich / C. Gregorius)
Transformed into a memorial site since 2015, the Rivesaltes camp regularly gives the floor to artists to bring history to life. With this temporary exhibition entitled Art On Site, Philippe Domergue, Nicolas Cussac and Nissrine Seffar deliver their personal, intimate and sensitive perspective. Immersed in the place during the creation period, the three contemporary artists linked to this territory and this history have each written their vision of internment and exile.
Three contemporary artists narrators of the past
Punctuated with different materials, shapes and images, the route through the Rivesaltes camp reveals an abundance of images and reflections where freedom is central. The result is poignant, deep and moving. Through his unique gaze, the visual artist Philippe Domergue invests the first space. For this exhibition, he took remnants of laths abandoned on the ground in the ruins of the barracks to repair them, raise them and make them the very material of his works. These pieces of wood carry traces, memories. By poetically reappropriating them and combining them with photographs from the period, he creates a disturbing alchemy between supports and images, matter and memory.
Philippe Domergue exhibition at the Rivesaltes camp memorial (France 3 Occitanie)
The second space offers a much more contemporary reading of the site. The Franco-Moroccan artist Nissrine Seffar has been roaming the Rivesaltes camp since 2012. Alone facing the ruined barracks, she takes photographs and makes drawings on plaster which bear witness to the erosion of these basic dwellings. Her installations, videos and photographs resemble an investigation in which she identifies and questions experiences, exile, wandering, scars.
Installation of Nissrine Seffar at the Rivesaltes Camp Memorial (Rivesaltes Camp Memorial)
The third exhibition presents the drawings in travel notebooks of Nicolas Cussac. These notebooks, full of poetry, recall those of the artists interned at Rivesaltes, and show life at the memorial today. To soak up this special atmosphere, Nicolas Cussac settled in Cussac for more than nine months. An above-ground “residence” that allows him to let time do its work until inspiration strikes. From wandering the idea and the line are born. Simple, refined, effective.
Drawings by Nicolas Cussac at the Rivesaltes camp memorial (Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes)
A place full of stories of exile
The Rivesaltes camp witnessed three major conflicts that France, Europe and also North Africa experienced in barely three decades: the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the Algerian War. . During this period, the barracks of the Rivesaltes camp saw thousands of people, men, women and children, of different origins, cultures and nationalities. The passage of these population groups to the Rivesaltes camp reflects the forced displacements resulting from these conflicts and the decolonization movements which shook the 20th century.
Initially built to be a military training center, the Rivesaltes camp was, among other things, an “accommodation center” for undesirable foreigners, an internment camp for populations victims of the exclusion policy of the Vichy regime, a deportation camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Drancy, a camp for German prisoners of war, a transit zone for foreign auxiliaries of the French army, but also a “Regroupment camp for Harkis and their families”. So its history is at the same time that of the Spanish Republicans, the foreign Jews, the Gypsies, the Axis prisoners of war, the Harkis, the FLN prisoners, the Guineans, the North Vietnamese and all those who lived there in often very harsh conditions.
“Art in Situ” at Rivesaltes camp memorial until January 28, 2024. Oopen Sunday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Prices: €9.50 and €6.50. Free for under 18s.
#Rivesaltes #camp #memorial #contemporary #artists #exile #uprooting