LATIFA LA?BISSI AND NADIA LAURO
la criée centre for contemporary art
Artsists: Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro
Dates:Till 3 June 2007
The choreographer Latifa Laâbissi will dance a solo in an everyday space, more specifically in the homes of residents of a city. She has set up a protocol. After scouting for locations and wandering through the city, she puts an ad in the local papers :
“Artist-choreographer looking for resident willing to host a dance project in his/her home. The proposition is free and will require 2 hours of your time. For more information, contact 06 .. .. .. ..”
After a preliminary conversation over the phone in which she describes her project and her way of working, Latifa Laâbissi goes to the home of the host of her dance. During this time, she observes the way in which her host opens his/her private space to a stranger, and makes a space available to welcome her. Without making any adjustments to its arrangement, she spends time in this space, occupying it. She lets her host decide whether of not he/she will attend the dance.
Latifa Laâbissi is accompanied by the video maker Sophie Laly and by the artist and graphic designer Jocelyn Cottencin. The films and photographs made at this time constitute the material for the second part of the project: viewing sessions at certain residents homes in order to watch the films together, that is to say an encounter between the team of artists, the residents and their guests, a discussion around this experience. The film is a single shot framing a space and its objects in which the choreographer enters for a 10 minute solo performance.
Her body movements, in interrupting the everyday use of these spaces and her status as a stranger, provoke singular narratives on the part of her hosts in which each participant reinvents him/herself and to which they bring their own idea of dance. The invitation may create slight states of shock or silences.
For Habiter in Rennes, Latifa Laâbissi has invited Nadia Lauro to imagine a space for la criée that contains a potential for fiction, a space to be inhabited by the public.
Nadia Lauro is a scenographer and visual artist who develops her work in various contexts: performance, landscape architecture, fashion. The different spaces she creates are scenographic devices, environments, visual installations, scripted spaces or living décors. She is a collaborator of the choreographers and performers Vera Mantero, Benoît Lachambre, Frans Poesltra, Jennifer Lacey and Barbara Kraus. Nadia Lauro is also at the origin of Squash Cake Bureau -scénographie et paysage, in collaboration with the landscape artist Laurence Crémel, for which she creates landscape installations and street furniture.
I Hear Voices is a sort of fur landscape with a sound environment to be occupied throughout the exhibition. It is an immersive space, somewhere between a “mental garden” and a “warm-up room for the public”, that will be scripted in a specific manner in order to generate new ways of seeing and of being together.
This project by Nadia Lauro is part of a series of performance-installations that includes Tu montes? (Ménagerie de verre, Paris, 2002 – Kanagawa Art Center, Yokohama, 2003) As Atletas (Serralves Foundation, Porto, 2003 – Lausanne Jardin, 2004, and I Hear Voice (Kaaitheater, 2006, Brussels – la criée Center for Contemporary Art, 2007 – Spring wave, Seoul, 2007).
Address:
la criée centre for contemporary art
place Honoré Commeurec – halles centrales
35000 Rennes
France
tel.: (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 10
fax (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 19
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
Website: www.criee.org
Admission free
Tuesday to Friday from 12:00 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday from 2:00 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Closed on Mondays and public holidays
Image Credits:
(1) Latifa Laâbissi, Habiter (Chez Daniel R.) © Latifa Laâbissi, photography by Jocelin Cottencin 2007
(2) Nadia Lauro I Hear Voices, Kaaitheatre, Brussels, 2006, Photograph © Nadia Lauro
