361°

Valéry Grancher

Valéry Grancher, “The Shiwiars Project” author won the artistic project call organized by Art aux Poles and IPEV (the french polar institute Paul Emile Victor). It was announced over Internet and on the palais de tokyo website: This french international Art Center brought together the people herafter to constitute a jury: Caroline Bourgeois (Le plateau), Marc Sanchez (Palais de tokyo), Françsoise Vincent and Elohim Feria (Art aux Poles), Alain Lesquer (French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor).
This year, during the summer in the fourth polar year context Valery Grancher will stay at the german french scientist base called Cordel. This French man is one of the first to carry out an artistic project to Ny Alesund in Svalbard! 125 years after the first international polar Year and 50 years after the international geophysical Year, international scientific community organizes the fourth international polar Year of March 2007 at Mars 2008. There is no doubt that this year will focus good number of media fires on the scientific, climatic, strategic, energy, policies related to these territories and why not artistic? Thus its project will name “Ny Alesund Pôle 0”!
You will be able to follow the advance of this project on his new blog, there

Sustainable design

Mathieu Acquart, a young designer realize a world tour in 8 months in 15 countries to meet some people and actions on the theme of sustainable design, respectful of the human kind and the environment, to improve the knowledges on this subject and to promote its use.

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Conteners, a nomadic art center

Conteners is a nomadic art center organised around merchandise containers, the 6mx2,5mx3m giant Lego blocks that one encounters along all the roads and in all the ports of the world..

Each year, the Conteners team selects at least 3 international ports and invites artists (from all artistic disciplines) in each city to take hold of a container in order to create a work of art in it.

From one to three months , artist and container are residents in a specific territory. The container, an empty and sensitive object, functions in the same way as a sponge, absorbing and compiling the elements that are an essential part of the local and popular memory and of the work in progress. The artist seizes all these elements in order to inhabit the container that will be used as a canvas, a mini concert hall, a performance theatre, a projection space, the basis of an installation...

After having been on display in the town they were originally created in, all those artistic units travel via road, rail or sea to successively compose an itinerant art centre, a great funfair of mobile art in each of the three container cities.

Through its mobility, this convoy of the arts reaching out to its audience in obsolete industrial areas and ports on the fringe of city centres redefines the relationships between society, its artists and their works...The]] www.conteners.org web site is a kind of “black box” for the project, and gives information in real time on the genesis, the progress and the situation of the container artworks, each of which are provided with a georeferenced chip card.

At the crossroads of art, science and industry, Conteners forms a network of energies, ideas and works to reinvent creativity in a world dominated by trade. At once a tool for creation and a collective work of art, a nomadic museum and an ephemeral installation, this mobile silo and symbol of standardisation aims at becoming the vehicle of the container generation dreams and utopias.

Containers are symbols of globalisation and of a growing uniformity in exchanges, but they can sometimes make up alternative, humanistic and sometimes tragic spaces : drug smuggling devices, hideouts for illegal immigrants, anti sniper walls, emergency housing during great natural disasters...As containers embody at once mobility and isolation, restriction and openness, gravity and antigravity, they offer artists a space for the imagination, an opportunity to redefine the artistic process, from the moment the work is created till the moment it encounters its audience at the four corners of the world.

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The waste of the world

We think that we’re going to read "The Way of the World", but it soon becomes evident that it’s "The Way of the World" that has got hold of us. This is how it starts: to begin with you can’t read anything else, that you can accept, but soon you can’t read anything at all. Bouvier has a way of squeezing out each moment of happiness till the very last drop and preserving the product of this distillation in the phials of his memory in order to draw on it for his survival each time that happiness can’t be found… And for you, where does that leave you? You understand intensely what an enormous turmoil it must have meant for Nicolas Bouvier to fix this journey forever in the scarcity of his words: words perfectly made one for the other, that it becomes intolerable to not be him, at the time and the place when he wrote.

We have to exorcize this book, to reopen it, to accept that it can be a companion on the road of life again- that’s to say how it is possible to recount today, to paraphrase Nicolas, what it means to "undo" "the Way of The World".

Others, dealing with the same problem, had the chance to sort out this question face to face with him. This is not the case for us. Nicolas Bouvier died in 1998. At that time we hadn’t yet been completely obsessed by "the Way". Years later , when it became pressing to offload the weight, seeing that Nicolas was long longer there, the only way to do it was to make the trip. Of course our experience might have taken shape in another way, by staying where we were for instance, but it would have taken someone else and someone much stronger to have done it that way.

More picture from Frédric Lecloux / Vu'

Tokyo's experience

Sandrine Marc shares her Tokyo's experience on her website.

Tiina Itkonen

Inughuit, is a serene tribute to the Inuit people of Greenland. Itkonen spent four months living with Polar Eskimos in 1995, 1998 and 2002. The images are from her book 'Inughuit' a portrait of the lives and landscapes of modern Polar Eskimos. Born in Helsinki, Itkonen was Finnish Young Photographer of the year 2003 and her work is already held in collections at the Helsinki City Art Museum, The Finnish Museum of Photography and the Modern Museum in Stockholm.
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Telebabouches

Short documentary in the heart of the souk of Marakech, by Arnaud Contreras.

Positive Hands

A short movie shot with positive women in Capetown, South Africa, to fight against stigma towards people affected by HIV/AIDS.

Jacaranda

Jacaranda is a "guarani word which designates a decorative tree from tropical America and Madagascar with vivid lilac-blue flowers, whose wood is appreciated in ebenistery under the name of purple wood".

Two motivated students found several similarities between this tree and the social entrepreneurs they are going to interview around the globe:
- Like the Jacaranda, whose roots take the best from the ground on which it grows, social entrepreneurs rely on their environment to elaborate solutions to social problems;
- Like the Jacaranda, which grows from South America to the Australian Continent, as well as in Madagascar, there are social entrepreneurs all over the world;
- Like the Jacaranda, that produces a wood of great quality for multiple uses, social entrepreneurs come up with ideas that can be exported and duplicated in different contexts.

The heroes you will discover on their website are not those who appear in adventure novels, history books or action movies. They are not legendary soldiers, famous politicians nor superheroes with magical powers.
But they improve the life of millions of people on all continents and build step by step a better world.
Their weapons : innovating ideas, determination and a deep belief in the capacity of each and everyone of us to change the world.
Their fieds of action: economic development, education, environment, health, social issues...

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Medina of Marrakech

A walk in the medina of Marrakech, Morocco. Part 1

A walk in the medina

A walk in the medina of Marrakech. Part 2

A walk in the medina

A walk in the medina of Marrakech. part 3

A walk in the medina of Marrakech

A walk in the medina of Marrakech. part 4

A walk in the medina

A walk in the medina of Marrakech. part 5

Medina of Marrakech

A walk in the medina of Marrakech. part 6

Medina of Marrakech

A walk in the medina of Marrakech. Part 7

Eastern Roads

Soviet Union officially collapses on December 25th, 1991. Fifteen years later, the 15 ex-republics of the Soviet Union are waking up and growing up between democracy and dictatorship, liberalism and neo-communism, between European Union and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, between laicization and religion, between inequality and unity.

Formerly regrouped together in only one block, 15 ex-republics of the Soviet Union are actually countries very different. And it is interesting to notice that when some young people are dreaming of Russia or United States, their parents or grandparents are missing the great Moscow’s Mother.

The goal of Evangeline Masson et Patricio Diez's project is to meet the young people from 20 to 35 years old, to know them and to understand their desires and projects.

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Brett Weston

© The Brett Weston

Brett Weston seemed destined from birth to become one of our greatest American photographic artists. Born in Los Angeles in 1911, the second son of photographer Edward Weston, he had perhaps the closest artistic relationship with his famous father of all four of the Weston sons. In 1925, Edward removed Brett from school and took him to Mexico where the fourteen year old became his father's apprentice. Surrounded by revolutionary artists of the day, such as Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and influenced as well by the striking contrast of life in Mexico, it was there that Brett first began making photographs with a small Graflex 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 camera.

The introduction to modern art the younger Weston received via the work of painters Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, unquestionably influenced his sense of form and composition. A quality of design was evident in Brett's early images of the organic and man-made. He appreciated how the camera transformed subjects close up and how the contrast of black and white further altered the recognition of an object. It is therefore not difficult to understand his tendency to abstraction, a characterisitc by which he would be identified throughout his almost seventy year career.

Returning to California in 1926, Brett continued to assist his father in his Glendale portrait studio while exhibiting and selling his own photographs. At the age of eighteen, a group of his images were included in the German exhibition Film und Foto, considered one of the most important avant-garde exhibitions held between the two World Wars. This recognition brought the younger Weston international attention and inclusion in numerous photographic exhibitions in the following years. Although his art will forever be associated with his father's, it is unfair to continue to suggest that Brett's style was overly imitative of Edward's beyond these early years given what we have discovered in an enormous body of work produced over seven decades.

In 1929, Brett and his father moved to Carmel, California where the Weston family, including Brett's three brothers, would maintain homes for the rest of their lives. At various times, Brett Weston also lived in Los Angeles where he had his own studio and portrait business, and in New York where he was stationed in the army. He later traveled extensively on personal photographic trips to South America, Europe, Japan, Alaska, and Hawaii. Following a 1947 Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to photograph along the East Coast, he moved to Carmel to assist his ailing father, and pursue his fine art work, including wood sculpture that was influenced by his own photographs.

Throughout the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Brett Weston's style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career; plant leaves, knotted roots and tangled kelp along the beach. He concentrated mostly on close-ups and abstracted details, but his prints reflected a preference for high contrast that reduced his subjects to pure form. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s Weston spent much of his time in Hawaii where he said, "I have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically." He died at one of his two Hawaiian homes, in Kona, in January, 1993.
© The Brett Weston Archive

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Sahara exhibition

© arthur andrieu

À 360 Productions has presented during the Villeneuve-sur-Lot book fair, the exhibition "The Sahara of the culture and the people", created by our team to explain their mission and programs in the Sahara. 14 well known artists have shown their artistic works.

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Close to the river

Close to the river from The Shiwiars Project, by Valéry Grancher.

Less Travelled

Less Travelled is the road chosen by those who are willing to explore one step further. It refers to less frequented synaptic routes that mediate our new experiences and sensations. To forge new pathways creates original views and new insights. These are the roads less travelled.

To travel is to discover and to exchange, to carry with you, leave behind, to mix, grind and rediscover. Through reflection and confrontation in a completely new environment we may begin to form new views from the outside in and from the inside out. The works presented in this exhibition all respond to this dilemma. Anna Boggon's poetic reflections in cast glass and resin pieces combine with her periscope-cabinet which opens onto new vertiginous realities. Lu Chunsheng's 29-minute narrative video The History Of Chemistry leaves us with an unsettling sense of bewilderment. This feeling becomes even stronger in Yue Luping's Far People Project which deals with personal displacement within constructed and mediated group identities. Lastly, David Cotterrell's self-replicating portrayal of a projected maximum density urban settlement echoes the actual backdrop of a realised dream.

Less Travelled is the concluding exhibition of the Artist Links China programme, a joint project between Arts Council England and the British Council. Artist Links seeks to nurture a fragile cross-cultural environment between China and Britain through links between contemporary arts practitioners. As a development opportunity for artists, the programme has facilitated early stage development of over 60 artists' projects in China and in England. These artists are young, emerging and established practitioners. Their work covers theatre, dance, live intervention, new music, sound work, video and other lens based practice, installation, performance, ceramics, curating, digital work and other cross art form practice. Whilst some of the artists have international reputations, all are working very effectively within their own regions and countries.

Exhibition Dates: 07/09 -04/10,2006
120 Moganshan Rd, Building 6, 2/F

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