Two installations by Emmanuelle Huynh and Jocelyn Cottencin at Carré d’art.
The Nîmes public knows the dancer and choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, a long-time artist associated with the Nîmes theater. It is with a completely different project that she is back, associated with Jocelyn Cottencin, who came to him from the visual arts. Since 2014, artists have embarked on moving portraits of cities, a long-term work, which gives rise to two video installations devoted to New York and the port of Saint-Nazaire.
Poetry, dance and documentary
The enigmatic title of the exhibition “From vertical, to become horizontal, to spread out” clearly describes the confusion in the perception of spaces offered by Emmanuelle Huynh and Jocelyn Cottencin.
In A Taxi driver, an Architect and the High Line, dedicated to New York, the walk is presented in a panoramic way with three screens and a construction lamp. The images travel through Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan or the High Line, along the Hudson River, guided by an architect and a taxi driver who have seen their city evolve, increasingly gentrified.
Filming New York is always delicate, as the immediately recognizable city carries a long mythology. The artists take detoured paths, film workers and construction sites, the flow of passers-by and cars. And in the middle, Emmanuelle Huynh and some performers dance. Always out of step with the frenzy, they mix with the crowd, they fit in discreetly. By gesture, on the quays or sidewalks, they show another city, another public space.
In Saint-Nazaire too, the landscape is powerful, with gigantic shipyards. With We’ve come too far to forget who we are, the artists film a day in this port, a workers’ fortress at the crossroads of worlds, with the same mix of poetic images, documentary shots and dance scenes. Unlike the bustle of New York, the atmosphere here is more contemplative, alternating between natural landscapes and industrial settings. The gestures are here more energetic, developing a collective spirit, a solidarity, a common construction. The visitor placed in the center of the room is immersed in this atmosphere, with four screens enveloping him, each tracing his own perspective.
The journey continues with images screen-printed by Jocelyn Cottencin, capturing gestures, moments, traces of the New York adventure. From the trip to Saint-Nazaire, the artists also brought back Diplomats, driftwood collected in the Loire, strange presences which also recall nature in this industrial environment.
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