The artistic festival, which crosses the city until September 11, takes a darker and whimsical tour this year.
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Is this a demonstration, a procession? The forecourt of the Saint-Nicolas basilica, in the city center of Nantes, is teeming with two-dimensional giants, monumental black silhouettes as outings of a painting by Jérôme Bosch. We come across men with a bird’s head, sneering monkeys who brandish flags, a standing goat, but also a skeleton, a slave or a fisherman. It is a dark and extravagant procession, a silent hubbub, a gesticing and ambiguous ball which welcomes, this summer, travel visitors to Nantes.
The unclassifiable Hélène Delprat, a painter fond of history, cinema and literature, thus imagined a theater of shadows on the scale of the city on this intimate place Félix-Fournier, but also on the most emblematic Place Graslin, where, last year, was enthroned a joyful roller skating track.
This time, the atmosphere is not at the party, and an angel with open arms and wings deployed faces an equally black large speaker. Even further, the disappeared trident of the majestic fountain of the Place Royale has simply been replaced by a flag with the Breton, imaginary heraldry, which is found on pennants announcing the festival throughout the city. This false shadow theater, where the pre-apocalyptic atmosphere becomes carnivalsque, is called “The theater of operations”, and gives the La de a demonstration that arrives against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, 7
glass steles
Another framework, another spectral vision: it is in a cemetery of the city, that of mercy, that we can continue exploration. The French plastic artist, writer and historian Pascal Convert was invited to design a lasting work, which completes the permanent collection of sixty pieces added over the summer, most monumental, such as the hemmitage belvedere by Tadashi Kawamata, with the most discreet, like the fishylus beaver, installed on a medieval city vestige.
The artist, in whom the question of memory and oblivion is at the heart of work, has designed a subtle installation, disseminated between the oldest tombs, mirrors of times, that is a set of steles in steles Glass with the air of holograms, with a flat side and the other in hollow, representing deer walking in the place: a doe, a young deer, a large deer and faes, which work like memento mori crossed by the light, peaceful ghostly figures placed on the ground.
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