[2022] Flâneries Franchevilloises

A Veduta partner since 2017, Francheville is a place conducive to experimenting and to inventing new tools for the programme. Concepts originated in the town and already shared via the Veduta network include: encountering an artwork in a shopping centre, teenagers devising exhibitions of art from the municipal art library’s collection in just three hours (!), and listening to an artwork underwater in a pool at the town’s watersports centre.

In 2022, the Flâneries Franchevilloises event is set to be equally surprising – and even more deeply rooted in the town’s identity. Through the subject of fragility, Veduta’s partners wish to emphasise the town’s wealth of heritage, including a forest and fortified architecture; and to consider how these two assets are actually used, as well as how they could be poetically appropriated.

The programme includes an intervention by Antoine Perez, an artist greatly attached to environmental issues who explores the connections between art and all forms of life. His propositions – stemming from his travels, his reading, the people he meets, his observations and his questions – are as diverse as the vast disciplines that he explores: drawing, writing, sculpture, photography and diagrams, but also performances and castings.

Perez describes his artistic activity as an ecosystem formed by a network of links and ideas. The relationships he establishes between them vary: they may be analogical, causal, antagonistic or even contradictory. Most of the time they are also rooted in, and flow from, a specific experiment carried out in the intervention area.

His poetic productions – exhibited or performed – thus open a window onto a multitude of often- invisible subjectivities which, when gathered together, lay bare some aspect of the world’s complexity.

In Francheville, Antoine Perez has been invited by Veduta to work around the town’s tree biotope (or habitat) to make anthotypes with volunteer residents, thus proposing a different perspective on their immediate surroundings and possible ways of appropriating it.

Photo: Exposition en trois heures at Francheville municipal library, Veduta 2019 ©Blandine Soulage