ART-PRESENTATION: The Middle Earth
Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham’s project “The Middle Earth”, which occupies the whole space of the Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, and is devoted to the Mediterranean region. This new and original collaboration comes from the artists’ desire to explore together the territory where they live, in a poetic and critical fashion.
ByEfi Michalarou
Photo: Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes Archive
In a similar vein to Jimmy Durham’s “Eurasian Project” that began in1994 just after his departure from America, and the project :Seeds of Change” that Maria Thereza Alves began in the port of Marseille in 1999, the idea of “The Middle Earth” project began little by little to take shape, in search of that vast continent, not at all defined by nations, but rather something that is completely imagined and dreamed, and thus, endless. After a period in Marseille, followed by Rome and then Naples, where they regularly travel, Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham settled on the coast of the “inland sea” following a continuous and engaged period of roaming that led them away from the American continent and all the way to Europe. The two artists reveal common influences that come, on the one hand from a political engagement that flows through their respective work, and on the other hand common areas of research that deal with notions of territory and authority. Maria Thereza Alves brings a particular focus to the experience of a territory and this guides the research, between poetry and ethnology, that she does on migratory phenomena and uprooted peoples. In Europe, Jimmie Durham’s work has focused mainly on the relationship between architecture, monumentality and national history, through the deconstruction of stereotypes and official narratives. The exhibition “The Middle Earth” has been created and imagined in the form of an active dialogue between recent artworks, original creations and a multiplicity of archeological pieces and objects originating from the Mediterranean basin, that have been borrowed from the collections from the Collections of : The Museum of Archeology of Marseille, The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon and The Musee des Confluences of Lyon. Divided into ten specific fields of knowledge that resonate with each other (“Food & Music”, “Writing”, “Dyeing”, “Glass”, “Mermaid”, “Temple”, “Flint”, “Plants”, “Trees” and “Iron”), the exhibition thus plays with universalist and scientific models such as the traditional museographic codes.
Info: Curator: Nathalie Ergino, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, 11 rue Docteur Dolard, Villeurbanne, Duration: 2/3-27/5/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 13:00-19:00, http://i-ac.eu
