Marine Hugonnier
dal 26/10/2007 al 8/12/2007
Segnalato da
26/10/2007
Marine Hugonnier
Kunsthalle Bern, Bern
Travelling Amazonia. The exhibition consists of 3 films and photographic works which come out of the artist's exploration of the entanglement between history, geography and its representation. 'Travelling Amazonia' closes the trilogy formed by Ariana, 2003 and The Last Tour, 2004, where Hugonnier explores the relation between landscape and history.
Travelling Amazonia
After showing in 2006, during the exhibition Pre-Emptive, two photographs out of her sequence Towards Tomorrow (International Date Line Alaska), the Kunsthalle Bern is announcing the first solo-exhibition of French artist Marine Hugonnier in Switzerland.
Featuring a new film-production: Travelling Amazonia, the exhibition consists of 3 films and photographic works which come out of the artist’s exploration of the entanglement between history, geography and its representation. Travelling Amazonia closes the trilogy formed by Ariana, 2003 and The Last Tour, 2004, where Hugonnier explores the relation between landscape and history. The question of ‘viewpoint’ is addressed in a different way in all three of the films.
Ariana questions the implications of the panoramic shot, its relation to political power, and at the same time tells the story of a trip and an undertaking that was never completed. Its failure is the film’s central theme.
The Last Tour is a fiction in the near future, showing the ‘last’ voyage in a dirgible over the Matterhorn national Park. The film seems to introduce the moment that scenic outings will defintively belong to the past, at “the end of the society of the spectacle”.
After a journey with a film crew to Afghanistan and a trip in a hot air balloon over the Matterhorn, Hugonnier travels to the heart of the Amazon jungle to film Travelling Amazonia. The film’s narrative is centered around the Transamazonia highway, a massive project devised by the Brazilian government in the seventies to establish a route that would bisect the Amazon forest and connect the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts. The objective of Hugonnier and her team is to build a dolly and tracks with the same materials as were employed in building the highway. The construction of the Transamazonia generated an industry around the extraction of natural resources like metal, wood and rubber. Hugonnier and her team make use of these materials to film upon the very same road a „travelling shot“, which re-enacts the linearity of the Transamazonia highway and which recalls the pioneering ideals that this colonialist project embodied.
The exhibition also includes photographic and other works which complement the films. Wednesday and Thursday seek to reproduce the exact moment of the discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral. Cabral first saw Monte Pascoal at dusk on Wednesday April 22, 1500 and had to wait for the early hours of next morning to confirm his vision. Beach of the New World shows the exact geographical spot where Cabral and his crew first went ashore. Hugonnier alludes to those few hours in history when the ideals, beliefs and made-up imagery of “The New World” made their lasting entry into the Western psyche.
Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1 - Bern
Hours: Monday: closed Thursday: 10 - 19 Uhr Wednesday to Sunday: 10 am to 17 pm