An artistic stroll around the Vauban Gardens at Nîmes University.
ESBAN (Nîmes Art School) Student Exhibition
Fort Vauban, one site of the present-day Nîmes University, has a long history. In the sixteenth century, when the Kingdom of France was in the grip of religious wars, this fort was built to keep watch over the town rather than to defend it. In 1687, the King’s engineer Jean-François Ferry designed a quadrilateral-shaped fortress based on Vauban’s military designs. The fort
features four corner bastions and is surrounded by a nine-meter-wide moat. After the French Revolution, the fort became a political prison; then, from 1820 to 1991, a maximum security prison. Purchased by the city at the end of the twentieth century, this prison was transformed into a university site by the architect Andréa Bruno. After being a place of confinement, Fort Vauban became a place of learning which has welcomed students since 1995.
The Nîmes Art School (ESBAN) is located near the Chapel of the Jesuit College, where numerous exhibitions are held. This former College, which is now a museum of archaeology and natural history, was built between 1673 and 1678 and was the city’s first institution of higher education. The Open Sky exhibition invites us to follow in the footsteps of this unique history.
There is nothing pedantic about the works created here by the ESBAN students, who were invited to take over the Fort Vauban Gardens, a space open to the public all year round. Their interventions in the outdoor space are imbued with the power and fragility of poetic gestures. As we wander along the moat, across the terraces and into the fort’s nooks and crannies, these works make us reflect on this place and its successive functions, rich in its transformations and bearing a collective memory. Open Sky invites us to wander, to observe attentively yet freely, contingently and fragmentarily, to be moved and to question our present within the multiple folds of history.
Julie Émile Fabre
1. Brigitte Bertelle
Untitled (insert).
Plaster, black ink. Variable dimensions.
Untitled (hang).
Ceramic, wire. Variable dimensions.
Dr. Charles Perrier, a physician at the Maison Centrale (prison) in Nîmes, conducted an innovative anthropological study in 1894. He analyzed, classified, studied, and photographed the inmates, cataloging their tattoos. This poignant perspective on the convicts’ only freedom of expression offers a unique snapshot of a prison of that time. My two pieces are
deployed in the Fort Vauban Gardens. One is a series of plaster forms that fill the deep recesses marking the fort walls. It gives tangible expression to the presence of bodies that once inhabited these spaces. The other hangs in the air. It dialogues with life forms creating a silent or resonant line that dances with the wind.
2. Django Beal-Lacueille
MnemeSys-Écho 0.75.
Interactive sound installation.
For nine months, a lapel microphone continuously captured every word spoken or heard by me: conversations, discussions, intertwined voices. This sound archive–over six thousand hours of recordings–is the heart of my installation. The visitor presses a button near the central microphone while saying a word. Eight speakers arranged in a vertical circle immediately broadcast every occurrence of that word captured during those nine months. My voice mingles with those of the people who passed through my life. Common words generate dense cascades; rare words, more intimate responses. Time folds in upon itself. Past and present collide around a simple signifier. The boundary between self and other is blurred. Is
not our sonic memory always polyphonic?
3. Nawara El Ramly
Now, but before.
Wooden battens. Variable dimensions.
Wooden frames focus our view of a place in the present.
A discreet QR code invites us to open an image.
Our gaze shifts toward an ancient memory.
The same place appears, transformed by time.
The visible is doubled by absence.
The frame becomes a passageway,
and seeing, remembering.
4. Loumia Carnet
All that glitters…
Satin fabric and steel chain, 300 x 1000 cm.
My work subverts outdated codes related to femininity (pink and cheap clothing) while confronting them to a powerful symbol of constraint–chains–which become fragile as they rust. The site, a former prison that has been transformed into a university, embodies this transition from repression to cultural legitimacy, thereby questioning our institutions as well as the social hierarchies we make.
5. Atefeh Taramshir
No title.
Cotton, wood glue, aluminium foil, elephant grass, acrylic paint, and styrofoam. 200 x 200 x 200 cm.
Am I torn apart
or is it me who resists
Am I taking shape
or being shaped?
Am I drawing the structure
or is the structure drawing me?
Toward what forces are
each of my limbs drawn?
From what angle
does my body decide to exist?
How long can I hold on?
I feel caught.
Deep fried.
Hung out to dry.
Suspended
in the gap
between tension and resistance.
I stand
at the exact point
where forces are equal.
Motionless.
Dessicated.
6. Emmanuel Hinkel
No title.
Elephant grass, Nylon thread, and black plastic. Variable dimensions.
My project isn’t about exploring the place from an archeological perspective, but rather highlighting the passage between different times. The status and function of Fort Vauban have changed over time, as have its interior and exterior architecture. Today it has become a university: a space-time continuum in which connections are created between individuals and with various disciplines. Connections are the key elements of the structures I have created for this exhibition, their equilibrium points. Without these points of contact and grounding, the structure could not exist or would run the risk of imploding.
7. Mona Sagot
No title.
Wood and acrylic paint, 150 x 100 x 170 cm.
Having reclaimed what was rightfully theirs, vengeful yet clumsy crocodiles hide in the moat, basking in their victory.
8. Fatemeh Taramshir
No title.
Clay. 20 x 20 x 150 cm.
Observation: Clay figures aligned at regular intervals on the grass.
Dimensions: Twenty by twenty, one and a half meters long.
Color and texture: Earthy.
From afar, nothing. From close up, the Persian characters: “We are illegible.”
Hypothesis: A language no longer spoken becomes an object. An ephemeral object.
Protocol: No stand, no frame. Wind. Sun. Rain.
Intention: Document deterioration. Archive oblivion. The disappearance of a language, like that of the culture it conveys.
9. Linh Phan-Angevin
Hatch.
50 ceramic eggs. Variable dimensions.
Hatch to exist.
Exist to hatch.
The egg is: transformation, resurrection, knowledge
Each one blessed with the same destiny, the same birth.
Ceramic eggs, an identical collective.
Individually shaped, each shell is made of the same material, has the same inner space. The individual is nothing without the collective and vice versa
10. Lilou De Coninck
No title.
Acrylic paint on fabric. 300 x 500 cm.
One of my delicate paintings made on a quilt is hung between two walls in the lower part of the Fort Vauban gardens.
Allow painting to exist outside, create a dialogue between forms and colors while exposing my canvas to the elements.
Allow people to experience my painting from different points of view that are far away and close up, to perceive my painting more openly, as they stroll. Open Sky
11. Dharma & bisousbaveux
Edge one final time.
Clay, soil, seeds. Variable dimensions
Here, the clay foot serves as a link between the body and the earth, between the desire to ground oneself and the urge to flee. It becomes the boundary between freedom of movement and submission to the gaze, between social constraint and the potential for emancipation. Through the foot, the female body returns to haunt a symbolic space where it has always been represented but never allowed to exist freely.
12. Lucas Lemesic
No title.
Mixed media, variable dimensions.
Look at those swaggering gestures
everywhere
hanging in the air
like damselflies
13. Quentin Blanchard
No title.
Tarp and charcoal. Variable dimensions.
A
4 winds,
Inverted protection,
A shelter that bites
Everything is built of fear and air
A
Stain to remain an instant,
Nothing opens but everything calls
A
Tarp rises
Rumbles folds resists
Is a shell
Where it’s not nice to sleep
But that you’d like to keep
Just to see
How it remains
Featuring work by Django Beal-Lacueille, Brigitte Bertelle, Quentin Blanchard, Loumia Carnet, Lilou De Coninck, Dharma & bisousbaveux, Nawara ElRamly, Emmanuel Hinkel, Lucas Lemesic, Linh Phan-Angevin, Mona Sagot, Atefeh Taramshir, and Fatemeh Taramshir
A project imagined by Isabelle Simonou-Viallat and Augustin Pineau,
artists and art professors at the Nîmes Art School (ESBAN)
Charlie La Via helped translate and rewrite the texts in English
Julie Émile Fabre is the guest artist who curated the Open Sky
exhibition
Django Beal-Lacueille designed this leaflet.
Quentin Blanchard made a graphic interpretation of the drawings
submitted by the different artists