The 2018 COAL Art and Environment Award yesterday recognized artist Jacques Lœuille for his project The Birds of America. The winner was selected by a jury of personalities of contemporary art and ecology among ten nominated artists, at the Museum of Hunting and Nature. A Special COAL Prize supported by the François Sommer Foundation and the Ministry of Culture was also awarded to Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil for their project Cité d’Urgences – Apus Apus.

These two winning projects, very different and complementary in their approaches, address the crucial issue of the sixth mass extinction crisis of biodiversity and in particular the disappearance of birds at an inconceivable rate: in only fifteen years, a third of the birds in the French countryside have disappeared.

The 2018 COAL Award was presented at the Museum of Hunting and Nature, during a ceremony that also celebrated COAL’s 10th anniversary.

Jacques Lœuille, Winner of the 2018 COAL Award

A graduate of the École des Beaux-arts de Nantes, the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal, and the post-graduate program at the Beaux-arts de Lyon, Jacques Lœuille joined the Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in 2009, from which he graduated with honors in 2011. Since then, he has produced video installations that have been exhibited in galleries, art events, art centers and museums. In 2017, he directed La Peseuse d’or-anessay on the emergence of capitalism in 17th century Dutch painting-which won the Best Film Award at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival and was acquired by the Neuflize Foundation’s contemporary art collection.

In parallel, he directs documentaries on art for Arte and France Télévisions and is currently finishing the documentary film Threats in the North Sea which traces the political history and questions the health and environmental consequences of the dumping of chemical and conventional weapons in the North Sea and the Baltic during the two world wars. In 2017, he participated in the 62nd Salon de Montrouge for the promotion of young contemporary artists. Jacques Lœuille was born in 1983 in Chambray-les-Tours, France. He lives and works in Paris.

His project The Birds of America questions the symbolic and real impact that mass extinctions and environmental degradation have on the political makeup of countries, and on our way of life. Starting from the idea that the birds of America are a national cement, wouldn’t the United States then forge an image in the ghostly reflection of its former Eden? These are the hypotheses that the author of The Birds of America is working on. In reference to the work of the French naturalist painter and father of American ecology John James Audubon, Jacques Lœuille creates an installation made up of seven films, each dedicated to a bird that has disappeared from the territory, in order to reveal a political counter-history of the United States. Americans have built a veritable mythology around birds, especially the most famous of them, the Bald Eagle. Recognized as the emblem of the nation, this diurnal bird of prey has become scarce with the industrialization of the country. Its survival today depends on a federal grant and protection program. As for the American migratory pigeon, it has completely disappeared, victim of the cult of firearms, or the Trétras, which became extinct in 2012, driven from its prairies by gas exploitation. What is particularly poignant here, as we are subjected to fake news and manipulation of scientific information of all kinds, is that these extinct birds are also the subjects of a veritable phantasmagoria: falsified or imaginary images and stories, false testimonies, confusion of species, photomontages and optical tricks… This aesthetic of the fake, through these falsified or erroneous images of bird watcher, will be present in the installation and will dialogue with the paintings of Audubon. The “high definition” of Audubon’s images and the low definition of today’s bird images contrast, highlighting the vanity of technology, which in its hyperactivity no longer knows how to preserve anything.

The winner of the 2018 COAL Art and Environment Prize receives an endowment of 5,000 euros and a residency at the Domaine de Belval, property of the François Sommer Foundation, with additional financial support for production.

A special COAL Prize awarded to Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil for their project Cité d’Urgences – Apus Apus

Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil have been working together since 2008. Martine Feipel studied art at the University of the Arts in Berlin and at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Jean Bechameil studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He has worked on various stage and film designs, and helped create the sets for several Lars von Trier films. The work of Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil questions our perception of space in a general way. They were selected in 2011 to represent Luxembourg at the 54th Venice Biennale. Since then, they have been invited to numerous international exhibitions, notably at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris and the Beaufort Triennial in Belgium. In 2017, the Casino Forum d’art contemporain Luxembourg devoted a monographic exhibition to them.

With Cities of Emergency, Feipel and Bechameil seek to implement a series of projects to provide species threatened by the depletion or destruction of their natural habitat with dedicated housing. Urban sprawl and the densification of rural areas around urban areas are now endangering the lives of many plant and animal species.

As tourism rages on and people move around more than ever before, less and less space is left for migratory animals and nomadic species. They are however the symbol of this freedom to move according to the seasons, which they announce by their comings and goings. Isn’t the flight, the shrill cries, the incessant chasing of swifts one of the joys of early summer? This bird has indeed evolved alongside humans, becoming accustomed over the centuries to using the crevices of the stone and mortar walls of houses to establish its nests. But contemporary architecture and its dream of perfection and functionality have eliminated all sorts of cracks and gaps from our buildings, leaving only smooth surfaces unsuitable for nesting.

Feipel and Bechameil, artists of the relationship to the body in architecture, of large housing estates, of the habitat and of the inhabitant, propose, in a rural region where the species has almost disappeared, to show that it is possible, by starting from the existing building and working in the long term, to gather the conditions of a return of this migratory bird. Establishing a multidisciplinary collaboration with scientists and the inhabitants themselves, they will develop new crevices in existing walls, thought as works of art in their own right.

This special prize is endowed with a residence at the Domaine de Belval, property of the François Sommer Foundation and financial support from the Ministry of Culture.

The ten artists nominated for the 2018 COAL Art and Environment Award were:-

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (England) – The Substitute; Belén Rodriguez (Spain) – Area ; Cecilia Jonsson (Sweden) – Tides ; Clément Richem (France) – Babel ; Elise Alloin (France) – The Dynamics of Phosphorus; Jason deCaires Taylor (England) – The Sculpture Coralarium; Lise Autogena, Joshua Portway & Ele Carpenter (Denmark & England) – Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld: The Community Radiation Monitoring Project; Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil (Belgium) – Cities of Emergencies – Apus Apus ; Rocio Berenguer (Spain) – G5_Inter-species

Discover all the projects in the
COAL Prize 2018 Catalogue

THE 2018 JURY was composed of:

Claude d’Anthenaise, General Curator of Heritage, Director of the Museum of Hunting and Nature; Monique Barbaroux, Senior official for sustainable development at the Ministry of Culture; Pierre-Emmanuel Becherand, Head of the Culture and Creation mission of the Société du Grand Paris; Nicolas Delon, Architect, co-founder of the Encore Heureux collective; Martin Guinard-Terrin, Artist and curator; Marianne Lanavère, Director of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière ; Marnix Bonnike, Director of the Sustainable City Learning Center at the Halle aux Sucres, Dunkirk.

The COAL Prize has become the international meeting place for artists who take up the main universal issue of our time: ecology. This year again, nearly 350 artists from 66 countries representing six continents competed in an international call for projects. Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition, the 2018 COAL Prize was awarded on October 24 to the artist Jacques Lœuille for the project The Birds of AmericaThe award was presented at a ceremony held in Paris at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, with the support of the French Ministry of Culture, the European Union, the Imagine2020 network and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature – Fondation François Sommer.

Image credits

Photographs of the COAL Award ceremony by © Julie Bourges

L’article COAL PRIZE 2018 – THE WINNER est apparu en premier sur COAL.

The 2018 COAL Prize will be awarded on October 24 at 6:00 pm, at the Museum of Hunting and Nature, in Paris. The ceremony will be preceded by a meeting organized in partnership with the Ministry of Culture recounting ten years of art and ecology and followed by an action of artists Lucy + Jorge Orta. Coal is also presenting until December 2 in the rooms of the museum, the exhibition Tierra del Fuego by Angelika Markul, winner of the 2016 COAL Prize. These events are the occasion to celebrate the ten years of the COAL association.

COAL, TEN YEARS OF ART AND ECOLOGY

For a decade, COAL has been committed to working alongside artists who wish to give culture its rightful place as a vector of change for an ecological and solidarity-based transition. The global ecological crisis is now affecting all societies, territories and activities, whether through climate change, resource scarcity, various forms of pollution or the erosion of biodiversity. A global crisis that is intertwined with its economic and social consequences. But this crisis is also a cultural crisis. The dominant values and representations, our globalized culture, determine our individual and collective behaviors, and ultimately our collective impacts on the Planet. Therefore, the solutions to this crisis can only be political and technical. Culture can be a major player in this. This is what COAL has been promoting since its foundation in 2008.

THE 2018 COAL PRICE

This year, on the occasion of COAL’s tenth anniversary, we are witnessing the beginnings of a renewal of the committed movement that continues to give meaning to the COAL Award. In ten years, it has become the international meeting place for artists who take up the main universal issue of our time: ecology. This year again, more than 350 artists from 66 countries representing six continents competed in an international call for projects. The ten nominated artists were selected for the aesthetic qualities of their proposals, their relevance to environmental issues, their inventiveness, their ability to transmit and transform, as well as their social and participatory approach. Together, they demonstrate how creation, in its diversity of forms and actions, is an essential force for building the future of our societies.

THE FINALIST ARTISTS

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (England) – The Substitute
Belén Rodriguez (Spain) – Area
Cecilia Jonsson Sweden) – Tides
Clément Richem (France) – Babel
Élise Alloin (France) – The Dynamics of Phosphorus
Jacques Lœuille (France) – Birds of America
Jason Decaires Taylor (England) – The Sculpture Coralarium
Lise Autogena, Joshua Portway and Ele Carpenter (Denmark and England) – Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld
Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil (Belgium) – Cities of Emergencies – Apus Apus
Rocio Berenguer (Spain) – G5_Interspecies

THE 2018 COAL PRIZE JURY

Claude d’Anthenaise, chief curator of the Museum of Hunting and Nature
Monique Barbaroux, senior official for sustainable development at the Ministry of Culture and Communication
Pierre Emmanuel Becherand, Head of the Culture and Creation Mission of the Société du Grand Paris
Nicola Delon, architect, co-founder of the Encore Heureux collective
Martin Guinard-Terrin, artist and curator
Marianne Lanavère, director of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière
Marnix Bonnike, Director of the Learning Center Sustainable City at the Halle aux Sucres, Dunkirk

PROGRAM FOR THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 24

4:30 pm: meeting Ten years of art and ecology looking back at the beginnings and evolution of a real movement with Nathalie Blanc, Ewen Chardronnet, Thierry Boutonnier and David Lescot. Moderated by Raphaël Abrille.

18:00: COAL Award Ceremony 2018

From 6:00 pm: Antarctica World Passport. Lucy+Jorge Orta reactivate the Antarctica passport distribution office in the rooms of the museum where theexhibition Tierra del Fuego, by Angelika Markul, winner of the 2016 COAL Prize, is also held until December 2, 2018.

This evening is part of the cycle of nocturnes on the imaginary of the melting ice presented by COAL at the Museum of Hunting and Nature.

PARTNERS

Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition, the 2018 COAL Prize is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the European Union and the Imagine2020 network, the Museum of Hunting and Nature and the François Sommer Foundation.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Free event, reservation required at contact@projetcoal.fr

Museum of Hunting and Nature
62 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Photo credits: © Anaïs Tondeur, Noir de Carbone

L’article Prix COAL 2018 – Nominees est apparu en premier sur COAL.

COAL Award 2018

The COAL Prize wants to reveal the richness of the answers brought by the artists to the current ecological problems and to accompany the emergence of a new culture of the nature and the sustainability. It is addressed to all artists who, throughout the world, bear witness to, imagine and experiment with solutions for transforming territories, lifestyles, organizations and modes of production. Together, they participate in building a new collective narrative, a new imaginary, a common heritage in development, a positive, optimistic and necessary framework for everyone to find the means and motivation to implement changes towards a more sustainable and fairer world.

This year, the COAL association celebrates its tenth anniversary. A decade of commitment alongside artists who wish to give culture its rightful place as a vector of change for an ecological and inclusive transition. These words are not a figure of speech, but the product of a story. Ten years ago we were still talking about “sustainable development”. France launched the decisions resulting from the Grenelle Environment Forum, the States prepared the 14th COP in Poland, in Poznan. Ten years later the COP24 will be again in Poland, in Katowice, and 2007 was in its time as 2017, the second hottest year in a century, while over the same period the threatened breeding birds in Europe have gone from a quarter to a third of the species. Last year, however, in Europe, the solar-wind-biomass triptych overtook coal in the Union’s electricity production. Some things have not changed as hoped… but the commitment is not weakening, on the contrary.

L’article COAL Award 2018 – Call for projects est apparu en premier sur COAL.