Fendre les Flots

In company with the artists here for the 2015–2016 season you’ll be able to stroll the shoreline, wander the cliffs and saunter along the coast; then watch the artists disappear as they head out to sea and vanish over the horizon. With them you’ll encounter animals, rocks and plants, tides turned back and the mighty Atlantic swell, equinoctial storms and the return of the sun, impenetrable fogs and whole new worlds. This season the sea is terra incognita, open to all our imaginings.

Fendre les Flots (Breaking the Waves) is going to bring endless visual shifts: looking at people from the landscape’s point of view, challenging our connection with conquest and making the language of water, plankton and trees tangible.

For a year La Criée will be transformed into a port, a boat, a wave, a world’s end. With four exhibitions in a row: solo shows by Runo Lagomarsino, Ariane Michel and Joana Escoval, and the group show L’Épais Réel.
And all sorts of Green Flashes tying in with them, including concerts, encounters and performances.

La Criée will be meeting the waves too: with an exhibition organised by this year’s associate artist Ariane Michel, who will be bringing together twenty artists all summer at Cap Sizun, in Finistère; with a Territories in the Making project headed up by Antoine Martinet in Rennes, further afield in Brittany and across the Atlantic; and with a collaboration with European Higher School of Art of Brittany (EESAB) and B.O.A.T ®, an artistic and educational research ship captained for this crossing by Marcel Dinahet and Nicolas Floch’.

At Esquibien, on the Finistère coast, Ariane Michel’s solo show will yield a film and second exhibition at La Criée. The artist will also be offering a series of screenings and more generally fuelling the programme with her interests, ideas and explorations.

To provide a record of all this, La Criée will once again be issuing its “aperiodicals” – Cailloux – which follow up what’s happening on- and off-site: texts by critics and researchers, contributions by artists, interviews and more – something to broaden everybody’s horizons.

Breaking the Waves means setting out in search of new worlds: making discoveries that are not conquests, but rather worlds we are sometimes so close to without knowing it. Breaking the Waves means jumping aboard
“To get away, far away from fossil possibilities
Far from the cubes ready to crumble into dust
And to reach beyond islands beyond continents
The door that opens to merry mariners.”*

*Raymond Queneau, “World’s End”, from his collection of poems Fendre les Flots