LES VICTOIRES, Art trail along the Canal Saint Denis

Along the redeveloped banks of the Canal Saint-Denis, on foot, by bike or by boat, walkers can discover the Les Victoires art trail, featuring 6 monumental works, in addition to the 40 or so works on Street Art Avenue.

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 the living. 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 experience of La Bouteille 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?