Machines Aveugles

Curator: Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri, assisted by Alexandra Deslys
A co-production with Mécènes du Sud Aix-Marseille

Neither violence nor the spectacular define the work of Anne-Valérie Gasc. Yet it is the very notion of destruction that is at stake. The artist considers this process as a tool to provoke a modification of our perception of reality.

Anne-Valérie Gasc develops precise demolition strategies (shockwaves, hydraulic sabotage, weakening of structures, burning) that put the certainty of our constructed spaces in crisis.

Her works are so many devices that print or film blindly, housing the advent of art in what escapes the predictable and control.

This principle of creation reflects the artist's desire to question our era, whose seemingly generous and modernist social and political ambitions inevitably seem to be collapsing.

The exhibition presents the Crash Box series, a video experiment that shows, in an unprecedented way, buildings demolished by lightning from an interior point of view, as close as possible to the explosive charges. The images captured in this way show, in the almost nothing to see of the collapse, the failure of the social project carried by this architecture of reconstruction.

His most recent project Vitrifications, the first part of which was presented at the art centre Les Tanneries in 2019, is based on a critical approach to a spectacular form of contemporary architecture designed by computer and built in glass.

Echoing this evanescence, the artist, in collaboration with Inria (a national research institute dedicated to digital sciences), creates a robotic device through which the viewer witnesses the construction of a ruin.

The use of glass microbeads widens the gap between the implacable automation of the robot that prints a digital model and the deposit of an unbound, informal and unstable material: the failure of the construction generates a landscape of crystalline dunes that collapse on themselves as they rise.

Finally, specially produced for the exhibition, the work Première ligne refers to the crosses of Saint Andrew that often support vernacular architecture and whose explosion of light calls into question, here, the principle of reinforcement.