Thematic cycle - Courir les Rues, Battre la Campagne, Fendre les Flots (Running the Streets, Scouring the Fields, Breaking the Waves)

Cycle
The titles of these three seasons are borrowed from Raymond Queneau*.
Queneau was a poet and writer, referring to him, that is to say that La Criée will be for the next three years a place where art is told.
Queneau was mathematician: like him, La Criée will feed on other disciplines.
Queneau founded the OuLiPo**: Like him, The Cree will be a place of experimentation and invention.

Adopting a model borrowed from the performing arts in a format that is new to the art center, La Criée collaborates with an associate artist each season. This format allows us to experiment with a new way of working with an artist over time, to be as close as possible to the creative process, to imagine new partnerships, and to develop special relationships with our audience.

Cycle Running the Streets, Scouring the Fields, Breaking the Waves cycle is built around the geographical, social, and cultural territories in which it takes place. It explores three horizons of action and three concomitant imaginaries: urban space, rural space, and coastal space.

Based on the conviction that art is a means of understanding the world and a source of enchantment, Running the Streets, Scouring the Fields, Breaking the Waves aim to break down barriers between categories and foster dialogue between artistic disciplines, confronting them with other fields of knowledge through exhibitions, events, encounters, productions, residencies, publications, and, we hope, the invention of new forms.

So come in, walk, run: we await you, numerous and curious, diverse and demanding, to run through the streets, beat the countryside, and devour the waves with us!
Because, if artists are our salt and works of art our asphalt, you are our fertile soil!
And because art, like poetry, overflows everything: they are the free escape***.

All sorts of events will back up the exhibitions: concerts, encounters, performances, surprise visits, etc.    

And in return La Criée will spend a year exploring the city: via creative projects in Rennes' neighbourhoods with artists Lucas Grandin and François Feutrie, and all kinds of activities in the public arena.  

Jan Kopp will be the associate artist for Courir les Rues, offering an all-new exhibition and a project involving local students and residents, as well as fuelling the programme with his interests, ideas and explorations  

Looking further abroad - to Cluj and Belgrade - in the context of the ACT Democ[k]racy project, La Criée will examine the issue of the city as a locus for the expression or repression of democracy.  

And to help the public keep tabs on things, throughout the season La Criée will publish Cailloux at irregular intervals: a closer look at the work being done in and outside the city, in the form of articles by critics and researchers, contributions by artists, interviews and more.    

That's how Courir les Rues will draw up a new urban geography. 
In which it will be revealed that
from vast slabs of concrete to unpaved alleys
                 and from boulevards at dusk
 to the paths of desire,
the streets are proliferating.

For a year the country will be sprouting at La Criée, an art centre transformed into a combination of wheatfield and active fallowland. Four exhibitions in a row: solo efforts by Gareth Moore, Yves Chaudouët and Jérémie Gindre, and the group show a l l e r dehors. (g o i n g outdoors). 
All sorts of events will be tying in with the exhibitions: concerts, encounters, performances, surprise visits, etc.

In return La Criée will be scouring the countryside: artists Mark Brown, Thomas Tudoux and Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle will be heading up local creative projects in agricultural high schools and other urban and rural establishments, and there will be further off-site activities as well.   

Yves Chaudouët is the Battre la Campagne (Beating the Bushes) guest artist. He will be offering an exhibition spilling out beyond the walls of La Criée and into the Rennes countryside; doing the scenography for a second exhibition; inviting his theatre company and all sorts of other fertile sources of inspiration; and in general fuelling the programme with his interests, ideas and investigations.

Beating the bushes in their own thoughtful way, the study days he is organising aim at triggering dialogue between different fields of knowledge, together with meetings between artists, biologists, landscapers and philosophers as they compare their different ways of reading landscape and envisioning creativity.  

To keep everyone up to date, throughout the season La Criée will be publishing occasional reviews - Les Cailloux - that follow up what's happening inside and outside the art centre with pieces by critics and researchers, artistic contributions, interviews and more. A way of broadening everyone's horizons.  

Beating the Bushes
Is drawing landscapes and faces 
Is turning the art centre into a living art laboratory 
Is beating to the rhythm of a growing leaf 
Is g o i n g outdoors 
           Is getting lost 
                    Is gathering herbs 
                              Is (self) cultivation

Is learning 
           Is discovering
                   Is look-seeing

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.

Fendre les Flots (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."*