Conversation on art // Nelly Monnier & Éric Tabuchi
Entrusted since 2021 to the critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the "Entretiens sur l'art" have been drawing up a formidable collection of artists' wordswhich for more than 20 years. From now on, they will carefully examine the materiality and the conditions of emergence of the works of the invited artists.
"How does one become an artist? What is a creative process? How does an art piece develop over time? How is it nourished by external influences? But also: where do artists work? In what financial and family economy do they work? What networks of collaboration do they set up? How does the routine of the artistic activity share with the more expressive and creative dimension of their work?"
Who knows the pagoda of Noyant d'Allier in the Bourbonnais bocage? Who is interested in the churches of the reconstruction in Lorraine? Who looks with attention at the community halls, the frescoes that decorate the low-cost housing, the fields of cabbage flowers or the water towers?
The ARN, a photographic archive project led by Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier, is devoted to the built environment, the landscape, and a set of unclassifiable oddities. It should eventually include 25,000 photos, fifty per "natural region," a deliberately vague spatial unit that designates, explain the two artists, "small territories whose limits referring to their natural characteristics are - as opposed to the administrative departments resulting from the Revolution - difficult to draw." And for now, three volumes of the Atlas have been published by Poursuite (the fourth should follow very soon).
To realize this atlas, the two artists travel the country by car, and follow, not always strictly and according to the residences and exhibitions, a protocol: 50 images per region, 3 days of shooting, no more than 2 minutes of post-production work per photo. One of the principles underlying the realization of the ARN is thus to participate in a rebalancing of the visibility of the French territory in a homogeneous way.
The very successful RNA website, launched in November 2021, is also a real success. And rarely have we seen artists with such a fan base.
For this interview, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier will talk about the ARN project as a whole, but also about their working conditions: a life on the road in France.
Atlas of Natural Regions: www.archive-arn.fr/
— Jill Gasparina
