Six artists have been invited to keep the values and joys of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games alive and vibrant in the memories of Plaine Commune residents, international visitors and future generations along this 5-kilometre walk, the first of its kind in Europe.

Conceived as monuments, masterpieces of a new shared heritage, the works punctuate the redeveloped promenade along the Canal Saint Denis. Strollers can discover poetic, committed and humorous works that play with the elements, context and living things. Their presence underscores the importance of ecological issues in building a common future, and contributes to writing a new collective narrative, in the service of building a world that is inclusive and respectful of ecosystems in all their diversity.

The works on the tour

Entre deux rives by Charlotte Denamur presents itself as a triumphal, colorful arch that inaugurates the artistic journey.
An immense drape magnifies the Stains bridge, and opens like a theatrical curtain onto the river axis, dedicated to the fervor and spectacle of the Olympic Games.
Created by digitizing some one hundred of the artist’s paintings, the canvas evokes an aquatic garden, reflecting the thousand and one shades of twilight.
With its monumental scale and flamboyant hues, it marks the final step on the road to the festivities and the ultimate in excess.
A tribute to the arches crossed by the victors and to the bridges that stand tall, Entre deux rives is a work of connection that invites us to come together, to cross social, cultural and symbolic boundaries, and opens up a dreamlike horizon, a space for contemplation and celebration.

Opposite the new Aimé Césaire metro station, Mathieu Lorry Dupuy ‘s Playground installation features a group of children, evoking the second day of the games dedicated to young athletes in ancient Greece.
As if suspended in time, a dozen childlike figures play, engage in strange oaths, parades and tributes, innocently reinventing the rituals of the games in all their dimensions – recreation, overcoming, concord and confrontation.
In dialogue with the industrial landscape, the work is both a reenchantment of the site and a tribute to the past of this working-class neighborhood that has seen so many generations of children evolve, grow, learn and discover the world.
The unusual manufacturing process, based entirely on locally collected and 3D-printed plastic waste, gives the sculptures an unprecedented graphic and colorful quality.

Along the Quai François Mitterrand, visitors can immerse themselves in Couleur du temps, a monumental fresco by Flora Moscovici spanning 250 meters.
The invitation is to contemplate a luminous work, inspired by the colorful variations of the Canal Saint Denis sky and the soft, shimmering shades reflected here, on the surface of the water, particularly at sunset.
Flora Moscovici’s work is the fruit of observation of architectural details, atmosphere, surrounding colors and traces of successive occupations, and aims to create a “different space”, offering an affective reading of the place, charged with new sensations.
Using an ecological lime-based paint, she reveals over twenty-five main hues and more than fifty subtle blends, like a poetic hymn to the world’s infinite transformations.

Opposite Parc Eli Lotar, perched atop an antique-inspired column, stands the popular and sporting figure of a female kangaroo holding an object that closely resembles a rugby ball.
But in reality, Victoria Klotz ‘s L’entraide et l’évolution is an oversized egg of a tern, a sea swallow that frequently nests on the quays of the Canal Saint Denis.
The kangaroo, which seems to have jumped up to protect the egg, becomes both a symbol of agility and balance, and of protection and solidarity with vulnerable species.
Between cosmopolitanism and biodiversity, this kangaroo from the antipodes acts as a landmark for Games travelers.
Bird nesting boxes concealed in the column’s marquee offer passers-by the spectacle of the passerines that freely inhabit the work.

The new Lucie Bréard footbridge is adorned with L’Envol, an emblematic bronze figure: a young boy who defies the laws of weightlessness to free a bird.
Imagined by Lucy + Jorge Orta, this Genuis Loci, or genius of place, is a figure of play, but also a call to future generations, a gesture of hope for a world more aware of ecological challenges, a dynamic and poetic image of renewal for a neighborhood in the making, at the heart of urban and ecological transitions.
With all the fervor of youth, he shows us the road ahead, so that the future of this industrial landscape becomes more inclusive for its population and its environment.

Opposite the Jardin de l’Ecluse, from July 25 to August 3, 2024, Abraham Poincheval took up residence in his work La Bouteille.
Measuring 580 centimetres in length and 190 centimetres in diameter, it became a veritable vessel inhabited by the artist this summer.
Positioned opposite the Stade de France, it enabled the artist to observe the spectacle of the Olympic flame from the canal.
For ten days, he stood on the edge of the quay, where residents, fans and intrigued tourists would pass by.
Abraham Poincheval, who is used to extreme practices, echoes notions of confinement, isolation and immobility, opening himself up to meditative journeys and questioning the resilience of bodies and their environmental interactions.
Bottled up in this way, Abraham Poincheval surrounds himself with the bare essentials of life – water, food, first-aid kits and conveniences – and a plant ecosystem that turns the cabin into a garden, a greenhouse, a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room and a dry toilet all in one.
The La Bouteille experience takes up notions of performance and endurance to question them: in a fast-paced society with intensified lifestyles, isn’t immobility a remarkable effort, a potentially political object, a performance of self-sacrifice or self-mastery?

L’article LES VICTOIRES, Art trail along the Canal Saint Denis est apparu en premier sur COAL.

In a powerful, ever-changing natural world, these antagonistic forces finally come together in a single movement, all vulnerable to a force beyond themselves. This breathless chase between seemingly antagonistic energies, punctuated by Vale Poher’s haunting music, gives rise to panoramas that seem to spring from the earth itself.

Based on a corpus of 19th-century naturalist engravings depicting hunting scenes, Vergine Keaton explores the infinite possibilities of animation, manipulating motifs, modifying them, retracting them, repeating them, accelerating them, making them coexist in the same movement. Je criais contre la vie is a symphony of constantly recomposing landscapes. Or for her, sharpens the perception of a world in perpetual interaction, where elements are irremediably intertwined and dependent on one another.

Born in Lyon in 1981, Vergine Keaton is a visual artist and animator. True gems of animated cinema, her films have been selected and presented at the Cannes Festival (ACID), the Berlin Festival, Times Square in New York, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art in St Petersburg, the Ateliers Médicis, etc…

The CLASP exhibition is freely accessible throughout the evening.

L’article CARTE BLANCHE FOR A SLEEPLESS NIGHT est apparu en premier sur COAL.

For the Nuit Blanche, Vergine Keaton presents an adaptation of her video installationJe criais contre la vie, ou pour elle (I was shouting against life, or for it).The film takes us to the heart of a dense forest where the ordinary is disrupted when a herd of deer rebel against a pack of dogs in pursuit. In an impressively powerful, ever-changing natural world, these supposedly antagonistic forces finally come together in a single, unified movement, all vulnerable to a greater force. This unexpected confrontation gives rise to panoramas that seem to spring from the earth itself.

Working from a corpus of 19th-century naturalist images and engravings depicting hunting scenes, Vergine Keaton delights in decomposing and recomposing these elements to create new worlds, generating new surges, new possibilities. Exploring the infinite possibilities of animation, the artist manipulates motifs, modifies them, retracts them, repeats them, accelerates them, making them coexist in the same movement. This approach of constantly recreating vast landscapes reinforces the perception of a world in perpetual interaction, where elements are not separate but interwoven.

Born in Paris in 1981, Vergine Keaton is a visual artist and animator. True gems of animated cinema, her films have been selected and presented at the Cannes Festival (ACID), the Berlin Festival, Times Square in New York, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art in St Petersburg, the Ateliers Médicis, etc…

Saturday June 1st

La Gaîté Lyrique, 3 bis rue Papin

The exhibition is open to the public for the duration of the evening.

credits : Insolence Production

music : Vale Poher

L’article CARTE BLANCHE FOR A NUIT BLANCHE with Vergine Keaton est apparu en premier sur COAL.