Search results for ""actes sud""

Native Land explores people’s attachment to their countries, and the planet’s role in forming one’s identity, as well as the paths and consequences of human migrations. The book features photographs and movie stills by Raymond Depardon, multi-screen installations and press articles, while the subjects discussed range fromTuvaluans forced to leave their Pacific island, to a human cannonball who catapults himself over the US-Mexico border.

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Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any pre-established method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over 5 years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: room numbers, customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain “Oddo” and more besides. What happened to room 501? More than 40 years later it has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musée d’Orsay curator, Sophie Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist’s archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle called upon the archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All this evidence has been assembled together to create an objet d’art which resembles an investigation notebook.

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Memoria: stories from another History is the idea of a collective memory made up of a myriad of stories, stories, questions and experiences scattered in our individual and personal memories. Revealed here, through the works of artists whose work refers to the (re) construction of a common whole, a universal whole, which renews our look at contemporary creation from Africa and its diasporas. Featuring fourteen artists who's work stand out for their desire to move the boundaries of art, to “bring together elsewhere” and to show the diversity of our common individual and ultimately collective histories. The selected works explore painting, textiles, sculpture, video and even performance. They make up a journey that echoes on the one hand a demystified reading of parts of history and commonly disclosed beliefs about the African continent, and on the other hand the way in which the devices of imaginary stories are still in the making. work, particularly in the economic and resource redistribution fields. Through this multiplicity of mediums, the works deliver their essence and show us artists with engaged practice, strong in their narrative power, anchored in their fluctuating geographies and in their time. By questioning our thought mechanisms, Memoria: stories from another History intends to open a discussion on our ability to renew our knowledge, to listen to different stories and to (re) question stereotypes and received ideas.

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A unique look at the works of Djamel Tatah and those of the minimalist artists in the Lambert Collection. Djamel Tatah’s refined paintings reveal the way in which humanity can assert itself as a presence in the world. From reality, ordinary life and world events, the artist paints life-size figures which seem to be suspended in time, set in unspecified places and caught up in a world of silence. Reinterpreting solitude as virtue, Tatah intends to surpass reality, experimenting with colour, light and line to explore his feelings of being part of the world. This catalogue creates a dialogue between the collection’s minimalist artists such as Robert Barry, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden, among others, and Tatah’s sober refined life-size figures, which somehow seem suspended in time and detached from the world. The artist draws inspiration from everyday situations or major news events to create a metaphysical representation of contemporary man. While Djamel Tatah’s work shows a clear relationship with modernist and contemporary monochrome painting, it is also part of a more classical tradition. Hence, the Paris School of Fine Art (ENSBA), where has taught since 2008, has loaned over fifty works from its own illustration collection, works by Delacroix, Matisse, Corneille de Lyon, Cimabue, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and more, with a view to broadening the dialogue with Djamel Tatah’s work over time.

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While undertaking this photographic investigation of North Korea, French photographer Stéphan Gladieu (born 1969) found himself under constant surveillance everywhere he went. Because of these constraints, he managed to invent an ingenious space of freedom. Gladieu created mirror-portraits of people he encountered and was hosted by, often full length, which require a face-on pose and a direct gaze. In this way, he managed to create a form similar to North Korea’s propaganda imagery, which made his approach more comprehensible and permissible to the authorities. Fifty years after its foundation, North Korea endures a media portrayal of war, famine, nuclear programs and military parades. Indoors, people are required to display portraits of the regime’s founder, Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-Il. Family photos are not allowed; nor are personal portraits. Consequently, Gladieu’s work attains an almost historic act of intervention in the country’s visual politics.

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In the mid-1970s in the United States as feminism gained huge momentum, three American photographers Eve Arnold, Abigail Heyman and Susan Meiselas published books of a new kind. Combining testimonies and images, they offer very original documentaries of women at work, their daily routines and their private lives. The trio brought their own style and experimented with the book format while showing women in a new light through photography. Their work sidestepped clichés to create alternative representations.This catalogue reveals their unusual approach to their works. The first, Growing Up Female by Abigail Heyman, published in 1974, is a kind of feminist personal diary. The photographer casts a lucid eye at her own life and questions the imprisonment of women in stereotype roles. The second, The Unretouched Woman, published by Eve Arnold in 1976, shows unknown women and celebrities in unexpected moments of their daily lives. The photos were deliberately not retouched or staged and, through them, the photographer offers a heteroclite and nuanced vision of women far from the glamour of glossy magazines. The third, Carnival Strippers, published in the same year by Susan Meiselas, is the fruit of three years of investigation into fairground striptease sideshows in the north-east of the United States. Through the performers’ long testimonies, the book gives a voice to its silent subjects, depicting their work, their dreams and their ambitions.The images provide an original perspective of female bodies, revealing their invisible make-up artistry and the staging involved behind their public appearances. In doing so it reveals a surprising, previously unseen glimpse into their sometimes prosaic, sometimes harsh private lives. It also reveals the social conventions and norms defining the status of women in society, within couples or within the domestic space to reveal working women, striving for independence and freedom.

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For Colombian architect Simon Vélez (born 1949), botany has been inextricable from architecture. His work has been significantly determined by his country's tropical resources, in particular its lush vegetation and abundance of guadua bamboo--a common species throughout the valleys of Colombia. Working in close collaboration with the engineerconstructor Marcello Villegas, Vélez has devised bamboo buildings that are extraordinary not only in appearance but also in their structural simplicity, and in their suitability for scenarios in which construction tools and resources are minimal. Vélez has so successfully popularized guadua bamboo that today even his wealthiest clients are commissioning luxury residences in this material formerly associated with peasant dwellings. He has also successfully persuaded numerous public administrations, town councils and businesses concerned about the environmental impact of their activities to adopt and promote guadua bamboo; he has designed bamboo buil

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The King’s kitchen garden was created by La Quintinie in 1678 on a plot of land nearby the Château de Versailles to provide fruit and vegetables for Louis XIV’s dinner table to the Sun King’s great delight. The whole garden covers nine hectares and is composed of a sequence of smaller plots, garden chambers whose walls and terraces control exposure to the sun and create microclimates to diversify production. La Quintinie was able to cultivate and harvest figs, melons, asparagus, peaches, plums, pears and more, sometimes even out-of-season. The King’s kitchen garden is also a secluded haven, sheltered by high stone walls and foliage, conducive to daydreaming and letting time stand still. A listed national monument, it has been open to the public since 1991. Today the ethos of the King’s kitchen garden is to protect the living world and the diversity of species. It contains roughly four hundred and fifty varieties of fruit and four hundred varieties of vegetable. It has conserved its triple function as a place of cultivation, experimentation into new techniques and training in gardening. Today it welcomes students from the national school of gardening, who are allotted plots for their own practical endeavors, as well as courses in gardening theory and practice. The garden has been growing and teaching for more than three hundred years without interruption. Walking the alleys between the plots we sense the history of this magnificent royal garden and the people who have made it what it is over the centuries. This extensively illustrated book tells that story and brings the garden alive to readers. The first edition dates back to 2003. This new bilingual edition takes into account recent intervening evolutions at the garden.

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Today, waste management – especially plastic – on a global scale is more worrying than ever. The Democratic Republic of Congo stands among countries most affected by the lack of accountability of manufacturers relocating and outsourcing huge landfills on its soil. Ranked as the 8th poorest population in the world despite their country’s immense mineral wealth, the Congolese people is overrun by garbage left by goods produced with their own resources and labor but yet designed for others. A folk-art movement was born from the junkyards of Kinshasa. Dressed in masks and costumes made from rubbish, a generation of street children and artists from Kinshasa's Academy of Fine Arts have come together to create “Ndaku ya la vie est belle”. Founded in 2015 by visual artist Eddy Ekete, this art collective brings together 25 creators who draw their inspiration from ancestral clothing arts to stand against the ecological disaster their country suffers. To amplify their struggle and celebrate their craft, Stéphan Gladieu creates a series of totemic portraits merging documentary photography with artistic practice. In a live studio set up on the streets of Kinshasa, he highlights the militant artists’ surrealist silhouettes and vibrant creations. Introduced by novelist Wilfried N'sondé, these portraits tell a story of creative talent passed on despite the attacks of consumerism.

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Since a young age, Lorenzo has delighted audiences with his spectacular horsemanship and stunning equestrian shows. Over the years, increasing numbers of horses, black and white, have taken the stage with him, whirling dervishes of energy and virtuosity performing to perfection in spectacles imbued with poetry and magic. At the final curtain, every show is greeted with lengthy standing ovations. Because what the audience has witnessed is not just Lorenzo’s technical prowess but a unique relationship between artist and horse. Through the sensitive lense of the Swiss photographer Heini Heitz, we follow Lorenzo at his secret ranch in the Camargue and also in the arena in performance. He talks about his special relationship to his horses, and how he trains sixteen at a time in total freedom to create his incredible feats of showmanship. We discover how he works with foals, how he lives alongside horses, and what they become in their retirement. We also meet Lorenzo the instructor teaching equestrian acrobatics to increasing numbers of young people while constantly inventing new figures to astound us in the arena.

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In Borders, Jean-Michel André questions the notion of border, a question which takes the form of a wandering, whose starting point is in the Jungle of Calais on the eve of the evacuation of the slum in 2016. André pursued the project over three years in France, Italy, Spain and Tunisia - anywhere there were refugees in search of shelter, anywhere there were men, women and children brought together by the same hope of crossing one final stretch of water. With these images of the Jungle, he mixes various fragments of landscapes to form a visual palimpsest. These silent places never cease to signify partition, rupture and desolation and exhale the vertigo of emptiness. Desires from elsewhere become dust and smoke in these spaces where the human figure, photographed isolated and from behind, is located on a threshold, between reality and imagination, memory and present. With accompanying texts by writer Wilfried N’Sondé, whose novels follow similar themes, together André and N’Sondé combine their disciplines the creation being Borders which is neither a linear series nor narrative – rather a collection of works.

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For many years now the company La Machine has been creating shows featuring fascinating giant machines which delight huge audiences of young and old alike in the cities of France and around the world. Gradually, these performing machines have become permanent installations in cities around France, an integral and integrated feature of urban development. Through four emblematic projects in Nantes, La Roche-sur-Yon, Toulouse and Calais, François Delarozière demonstrates how the elegant dynamics of this mechanical bestiary relates to space and to human performers. He speaks of the machines’ creation and charts the daily lives of the company, its members, artists, technicians and artisans and how they undertake such visionary projects of mechanical urban architecture working in tandem with local authorities. After the book La Machine spectacle, here is Machines de ville, highlighting the machines which have slipped into people’s daily lives, churning out dreams, sparking discussion, stirring emotions and reflecting us back to our own humanity by their mere presence in the city.

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The second volume of the Lambert Collection Icons series collects some of the finest works by one of America’s foremost abstract painters, and narrates the creation of his paintings from compositional elements to their “activation” in exhibition spaces. Robert Ryman (1930-2019) was a giant of minimalist painting. He settled in New York in 1952, initially aspiring to a career as a jazz musician. Alone he discovered art, visiting the city’s myriad museums and galleries, and taught himself to paint. In a career spanning 60 years, Ryman relentlessly pared down the essentials of painting and its emotional possibilities. Stroke by stroke, line by line, work by work, Robert Ryman tells the story of the creation of his paintings in its totality from the elements within them to their activation in exhibition spaces or in works - “It was never an intention of mine to make white paintings,” he told Art News magazine in 1986. “The white is just a means of exposing other elements. White enables other things to become visible.” - Robert Ryman

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At the invitation of the town of Cannes, renowned German artist Nils-Udo, pioneer of Land Art, will create several ephemeral installations this summer on Ile Sainte- Marguerite, the largest of the Lérins Islands, an exceptionally preserved natural site at the heart of the French Riviera. The event will be immortalised through a collection of original photographs that will complete the monographic exhibition dedicated to the links between Nils-Udo, the Mediterranean and the islands. Through his installations on water, mossy wooden rafts, fleeting installations of turf, flowers and bamboo on the infinite scope of the Mediterranean, the visitor will be taken to Italy and the Spanish islands in order to look with fresh eyes upon the beauty, but also the fragility, of these sites. This exhibition, curated by Frédérique Citéra-Bulot, director of the Musées de Cannes, will take place in the spectacular location of the Musée de la Mer, in the Fort Royal de l’Ile Saint-Marguerite rooms dedicated to contemporary photography.

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In the USA, the dozens of Monsanto sites have been classified as sensitive zones by the Federal Environmental Agency due to the sites’ activities, which have already had grave consequences for human health and for the environment. For the sake of mankind and the environment, scientists and institutions have sounded the alert.This photographic investigation sets out to observe Monsanto site practices in order to understand the impact of their activities on people and the environment. The jury’s unanimous choice for the Dummy Book Award at the Fotobook Festival Kassel 2016, the book offers a photographic journey through the past and present of the chemical industry. Using an original graphic approach, it brings together archive documents, as well as portraits and landscapes of the people and places affected by the environmental consequences of the Monsanto sites’ production. The book was also commended by the Luma Dummy Book Award jury at the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles 2016.

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En 2021 publicó el libro Comme nous existons en Actes Sud: la autora relata su infancia y su adolescencia, las normales de una joven de origen inmigrante y obrero. ?Una autobiografía conmovedora?, para France Culture. Un texto de ?prodigioso esplendor?, para Télérama. Kaoutar Harchi explica haber roto, definitivamente, con la obra de ficción y la forma novelística.

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More than two hundred charcoal drawings make up this tongue-in-cheek handbook of bad life advice in broken english . These satirical phrases, sometimes funny, sometimes right, aim to make us live the good life . A basic guide, simple, elementary, terribly humorous and refreshing. This work appears on the occasion of two exhibitions at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau and at the Ferme des Tilleuls in Renens. Its design is produced by the graphic design office NORM in Zurich. Augustin Rebetez is a Swiss artist who builds a powerful and sprawling universe that can be discovered in exhibitions, shows or in books. He notably published Le Coeur entre les dents - Primitive Manifesto with Actes Sud in 2020. Label Rapace

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Lan Cook (Author) Lan joined Usborne after working as a bookseller. She absolutely loves learning about anything and everything. She has lived in China, attempted to create the perfect aquarium biotope, studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University, and can hit an archery target from 100 feet away. Lan has always loved collecting knowledge and as many weird facts as possible, so working for Usborne really is a dream job!Laurent Kling (Illustrator) Laurent Kling started his career as an illustrator in the 2000s. He works mainly for young people, where he is called upon to make historic or scientific subjects more fun, and his clients have included Bayard, Fleurus, Milan and Larousse Actes Sud. He has also had comic books published in Canada by Editions de la Pastèque.

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Notice to cat lovers! This photographic series is a tribute, made of humor and witchcraft, to felids of all races. Gleaned from the internet, nonchalantly retouched in Photoshop, these images show stupid and demonic creatures. But it is ultimately a satirical portrait of our society that the artist mischievously portrays in this book, produced for two exhibitions at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau and the Ferme des Tilleuls in Renens and designed by the graphic design office NORM in Zurich. Augustin Rebetez is a Swiss artist who builds a powerful and sprawling universe that can be discovered in exhibitions, shows or in books. He notably published Le Coeur entre les dents - Primitive Manifesto with Actes Sud in 2020. Label Rapace

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