La Littorale #8 – Anglet Contemporary Art Biennial

La Littorale #8 – Anglet Contemporary Art Biennial

Lauranne Germond, director of COAL, is curator of the 8th edition of La Littorale, the Biennale of contemporary art in Anglet. This edition entitled ” L’Écume des vivants ” will take place from August 7 to October 31, 2021. Twelve artists take over the beach and celebrate life and movement, poetry and life, in an anthropized world.

Like foam, living things are fragile but also volatile, agile and in perpetual renewal. Under the artistic direction of Lauranne Germond – COAL, this edition intends to awaken our senses and stir our consciences, reminding us of our condition of living among the living.

With the artists Art Orienté Objet, Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil, Jérémy Gobé, Elsa Guillaume, Séverine Hubard, Angelika Markul, Mioshe alias Antoine Martinet, Laurent Pernot, Bélen Rodriguez, Stéphane Thidet, Laurent Tixador and Jacques Vieille.

These twelve artists are thus invited to confront the ocean and the exceptional sites of the Chambre d’Amour and La Barre- Izadia ecological park, where the dunes of the Atlantic coast, the cliffs of the Basque Coast, the pine forest and the mouth of the Adour meet. The Littorale then becomes a plastic and scenic proposal that captivates the spectator’s attention and invites him to converse with the works.

Anglet’s four kilometers of beach stretch between the last dunes of the Atlantic coast and the first foothills of the Pyrenees. It is the rock of these mountains, first weakened by erosion, then transported from the peaks to the Adour, which, crumbling little by little, formed the sand. A coastline, like so many others, where the history of life was written. For it is at this junction between aquatic and terrestrial environments that life diversified, a few billion years ago.

On this linear coastline, beaten by winds and waves, humans have fought to root the essence of their activities: planting forests to stabilize and sanitize the wetlands; exploiting them for naval architecture, to conquer new territories and hunt whales until they disappeared from these waters during the 17th century; damming the mouth of the Adour River to fix and build a deep-water port dedicated to exports ; concreting the grounds to reach the standards of a booming seaside agglomeration; assembling breakwaters in n and bringing down sand every day from the open sea, to maintain at all costs these beaches necessary to tourist activities.

At the end of this long history, four kilometers of profoundly transformed ecosystem that, despite the apparent and omnipresent power of the ocean, project environments, species and spaces into an uncertain future.

In this artistic journey, Lauranne Germond wanted to compose a sensory poem on the diversity of life forms, to revive attention to the beauty and complexity of the coastal environment and the need to invent new territories shared with the living. Twelve works, as if deposited by the waves along the coastline, mingle with twelve observation points of biological, geological and systemic particularities, creating a dialogue and confusion between works of culture and nature.

Along the water, the artists have imagined evanescent, contemplative, surprising forms that react to the special cities of the coastline, its history, its resources and the richness of its ecosystem. They rub shoulders with the agile and resilient living creatures that maintain themselves on the cliffs: the protected sand lily, rooted in the wasteland on the seafront that has been rendered unbuildable, the rare chiropterans that sometimes still nest in the cave of the Chambre d’Amour and the swarms of lapwings that stop overnight in the brackish waters of the Izadia ecological park.

The Anglet coastline becomes, during the biennial event, the natural and creative setting for an odyssey into the meanders of life, where the great cycle of matter and its metamorphosis is outlined.

Practical information
Dates: From Saturday August 7 to Sunday October 31, 2021
Location: In the open air on the Anglet coastline, two courses, one at the Chambre d’Amour and the other at the Barre-parc écologique Izadia
Coming to Anglet : 4 hours by train from Paris. 2 hours drive from Bordeaux. Anglet is the third largest city in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department (40,000 inhabitants). It is a seaside resort renowned for its natural environment (4.5 km of coastline, forest), ideal starting point to discover the Basque Country and the neighboring cities of Biarritz and Bayonne.
Price: access, visits, meetings and workshops are free.


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