Exhibition at the tourist office of Saint Martin – november 22, 2013
A private showing and an exhibition at the Tourist Office of Saint Martin from November 22, 2013 to January 24, 2014. The sales will be in favor of HeadMade Factory.
In November 2012, HeadMade Factory gave the general public an exhibition called “Hey you? What do you see of Saint Martin” as well as roundtables on the stakes of the development of art-related tourism. HMF used this event to invite four personalities -from the contemporary art’s world and from cultural coordination – to analyze the island’s artistic potential with the aim of organizing in Saint Martin a first worldwide contemporary art event. That was one year ago.
Then, Régine Cuzin – a curator specialized in the contemporary art of the French Overseas Territories – and Fabienne Pourtein – a professional in cultural engineering – came to meet the artistic talent pool from Saint Martin. Besides, Richard Conte (Director of CNRS, Visual Arts section) and Bernard Darras (Professor at the Sorbonne University, Paris I), also invited by HMF, already came back since November 2012, notably in April 2013 to make a video on the culture and creation of and from Saint Martin. This experience left its mark on some artists.
These four people where then reunited around Alain Richardson (President of the Regional Government of Saint Martin), the Prefect Mr Philippe Chopin, Mrs Sylviane John (Tourist Office Director), but also around other guests and operators of the touristic and economic life of the island, as well as HMF members, in order to discuss the stakes of the development of art-related tourism. With this support, HMF was able to build a nonprofit project and carry on their administrative procedures towards the submission of a FEDER financing file, just as the local institutions had recommended. Today we know that this submitted file was deferred but not turned down: in other words, it was put on hold until it can be submitted again when the new FEDER operational program is launched, probably in June 2014. But this doesn’t mean the project will one day come to a successful conclusion.
So in the meantime, HMF has already bounced back and reshaped his 2013 project for 2014. And today, just like so many nonprofit associations, HMF has to face ambitions that will prove to be useless without financing. HMF also appeals to the generosity of the island’s patrons.
About the exhibition: “ET…SoUDAIN… L’Instant D’APRèS” (And then…Suddenly… The moment after)
This exhibition of new digital research by Florence POIRIER-NKPA could have been titled “Trips memories” but she went with “And suddenly… the moment after”. She invites you to discover indeed a series of artistic propositions about memories. But far from only being trips memories they are also, and above all, a momentary snapshot. From photographs, thought of as sketches or more precisely as the vestiges of the instant, the spectator is invited to go from the reality of shapes to the strangeness of a dramatized scene by the pictorial gesture and its digital metamorphosis. With a certain mannerism linked to the gestures, and the constant desire to rub, scratch and erase the reality, the figurative scenes of life disappear to reveal the nostalgia of the moment after… This moment that scatters smells, colors, shapes and that also evaporates with time. For the artist and thanks to the pictures on his phone, it’s about grasping things more than re-establishing the authenticity of a character, of an architecture or of a scene of life. Those things that, in the moment after, got associated with the esthetic of a an atmosphere exalted by the memory and by both the pictorial and digital juxtaposition effects.
Know more about Florence POIRIER-NKPA: www.florencepoiriernkpa.com