Seven artists (the duo
Art Orienté Objet, Amy Balkin, Gilles Bruni,
Seamus Farrell, Romain Pellas, and Akira Sunrise) explore the issues of the ecological crisis and how humanity is endangering itself, from a reflection on the territory of the bucolic valley of the Lot in France.
This book reviews and amplifies topics and experiences achieved in
Worldwatchers 3,
an exhibition proposed by
Art Orienté Objet and presented by the Maison des arts Georges
Pompidou for the Contemporary Art Trail in the Lot valley during summer 2009.
To explore just how humanity is endangering itself in a valley that witnessed its early years forms
a strikingly common-sense juxtaposition: looking back to one's ancestors is the best means for
a civilization to question the path it has taken, to roll back the “film” so as to pinpoint just where it
might have gone wrong. The potential for consciousness-raising appears more salutary in what is
an apparently extraordinarily well preserved landscape.
The seven artists welcome in the Maisons Daura in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie chose to partake in the
intellectual and artistic enterprise of a strand of ecological thinking (understood as a “science
of the conditions of existence”).
For
Worldwatchers 3, they sign artworks in which landscape
is no longer just an object of contemplation, pure fusion or ecstasy, but an object of discussion
and strategy, a platform for action.
This book is accompanied with several contributions which put in perspective the artistic
propositions and their relations to the territory, extract their potential for polemic
and transgression, and thus renew our way of seeing our common inheritance.
