[spectre] Tales of a Sea Cow

[bureaud at altern.org]

I am happy to send you herewith the info about the exhibition of Etienne
de France that starts this week in Torino, Italy, at the Parco Arte
Vivente.

Best
Annick

************
Thursday March 29th 2012, at 18.30, as part of the PAV 2012 Art Program
dedicated to the Ethos of the living, will see the opening of Tales of a
Sea Cow, personal show of Etienne de France, curated by Annick Bureaud.

The multimedia project by Etienne de France (Paris, 1984, he lives in
Paris and Reykjavik) is the result of intense work on biodiversity using
as tools his imagination: a voyage towards a geographical and mental finis
terrae.
Tales of a Sea Cow revolves around Steller’s rhytine, a marine mammal
first seen in 1741 in the waters of the Bering Sea between Siberia and
Alaska, and declared extinct within a few decades. The exhibition offers a
bitter metaphor for the speed and voracity with which man tends to
appropriate the environment.

Collaborating with paleo-zoologists and biologists, the artist retraces
every tiny detail concerning the existence of Steller’s rhytine and
reconstructs its world – its habitat, the routes it used to follow, its
behavioural patterns – trying to fill the void created by the animal’s
extinction. Exploiting the latest scientific methods and techniques, de
France imagines and follows a team of experts engaged in checking reports
of some unexpected sightings, looking for confirmation, at least in the
form of sound recordings, to prove the survival of some specimens of the
long-lost Sirenian.
The result is a blend of science and fiction, in which elements of the
real are interwoven with the dimension of the possible, perhaps with that
of dreams. Thus Tales of a Sea Cow, as the fact that the title is in the
plural shows, is a series of many images, a story that is open to many
interpretations, that has been constructed by combining many different
sources and materials.
The exhibition at PAV weaves its way through the many stories of the sea
cow, like so many chapters in a novel: first introducing a character and
his or her world, then telling of their ups and downs, encounters and
destiny. Thus, by taking an approach typical of a museum of natural
history, we discover hydrophones, plastic models, plaster casts of
fossils, maps, articles and drawings that illustrate and comment on the
search for the rhytine, until we reach the heart of the exhibition, in the
project room. Here, the feature film Tales of a Sea Cow accompanies the
visitor on the track of the long-lost animal, finally decoding its song
through the interactive device Stellar, made available for public use in
the PAV greenhouse. The sound archive of the vocal production of the
marine mammal, recorded by biologists Thorarinn Mar Baldursson and Jena
Torgessik in the waters of Greenland, rings out in the PAV courtyard as a
moving chorus of echoes.
In this context, the real and the imaginary, true and false, become
categories that are superfluous to understand the tension running through
the complex relationship between man and the environment, a relation that
is physical but also mental, in which the act of destruction and its
denial coexist.

This magic box, this kaleidoscope of one story within the next, holds one
final surprise: a parallel story. This is an inclusive narrative thread
that comprises, on one hand, a sound guide interpreted by the voice of
actress Gisella Bein, and on the other hand, for the blind and
partially-sighted public, tactile maps and concrete objects to touch and
experiment with, designed by Stefano Lattanzio, as part of the Turin
Polytechnic Industrial and Architectural Design Course.
Within the framework of PAV Educational and Teaching Activities, curated
by Orietta Brombin, Tales of a Sea Cow becomes the starting point for the
workshop Gulliver’s Travel, dedicated to exploring in depth the theme of
otherness through the curious eyes of the traveller of the
eighteenth-century literary genre.
In the area of education for young artists and adults in general, on
Saturday June 2nd the theme will be taken up again by Piero Gilardi in a
public workshop entitled Noi come animali (Us as animals).


Etienne de France – TALES OF A SEA COW
March 30th to June 24th 2012
Wednesdays to Fridays, 13.00 – 18.00; Saturdays and Sundays, 12.00 – 19.00
Entrance: full price 3 €, reduced price 2 €, free for holders of
Abbonamento Torino Musei / Torino+Piemonte Card season tickets.