Collective Exhibition - Matter-of-fact :
Gabriela Albergaria, Cécile Beau, Yasmina Benabderrahmane, Alexandra Bircken, Elina Brotherus, Jim Campers, Rodolphe Delaunay, Jean Dubuffet, Sophie Dubosc, Sandra Lecoq, Jonathan Loppin, Kotscha Reist, Alain Sonneville, Stéphane Thidet, Yoann Thommerel, Tatiana Wolska
"Matter-of-fact", the 2nd edition of "Voisins de Campagne", brings together five visual artists and an author, in residence in five remarkable private properties in Normandy. They have produced a work or a group of works, designed for each place and made on the spot with the support of the SHED team and, if necessary, of the people present on site.
At the same time, the artists are brought together for a group exhibition at the Galerie Duchamp on the same dates as the tour. Other artists will come and put their works in dialogue with those of the artists of the "Voisins de Campagne" tour.
Matter-of-Fact / Les pieds sur terre
The English expression "as a matter of fact" and the qualifier it has generated ("matter-of-fact") would literally translate as "la matière des faits". It characterises a way of thinking, a pragmatic approach to the world, based on particular occurrences rather than general laws. It could refer to a way of looking at the world which, rather than seeking to see a system encompassing the whole, seeks to take into account the diversity of variations in the world. An approach that prefers plurals and lower case letters to the all-important singular.
It is in this sense, in this attention to the particularities of places that "Voisins de Campagne #2" is inscribed: places that do not only embody a heritage, a history, and for which it is necessary to valorise what is typical and attaches them to a category, but also what makes them singular sites: the dreams and mental projections that have nourished them, the lives that have traversed them, the families, attached to a territory, that have conceived them, made them evolve and continue today to try to make them live not as anachronisms but as places of life and encounters.
It is here the literal translation of the expression that we will focus on, with artists who start from the material - and in particular the material of the places - to inhabit them with their own imaginations and fictions, mixed with those of the people who have occupied them.
