Les Merveilles (The Wonders)

Gabrielle Manglou is originally from Reunion. In 2020, she chose to settle in Port-Louis, Morbihan, following an initial residency with La Criée centre d’art contemporain and the Musée national de la Marine Citadelle de Port-Louis.

Gabrielle Manglou’s work is poetic and multiform. Drawings, photographs, sculptures and archive images delight in shifting certain boundaries. Her work questions the sphere of human relationships, where power, nature, culture and otherness are measured.

With the Les Merveilles school residency, she proposes to consider otherness — as the quality of what is other, in humans and non-humans (the plant, animal, mineral and cosmic worlds) — “like a communion, a reflective surface that leads us to see ecology not just as a science or a political formula, but as an internal prose of the world, an incessant dialogue, an inseparability of all things and beings, a necessary conviviality with and through the living”. What the artist wishes to highlight with Les Merveilles “is the awareness of reciprocity as a sensitive phenomenon of understanding the world”. She will take the different cultural perceptions that the pupils have of their environment, whether near or distant, as a starting point to develop a collaborative creation based on her detailed approach to the environment, as well as on surveys, collections and other discoveries.