Known for having represented France during the 58th Biennale of Venice in 2019, Laure Prouvost offers a generous response to the invitation made to it by three institutions, Lighthouses of Marseille, Mucem, Mac and Old Charity. The Mucem in the space of Fort Saint-Jean and the city museums give it pride of place for an entirely free initiation journey.
The visible part and which gives the East an enormous weather vane on the Tower of King René that the artist has designed like a creature in full metamorphosis whose metal translation was inspired by those of the Mucem collection. Taking up the myth of Icarus linked to the Mediterranean universe, it feminizes it by giving it the sweet name of Icar- Us. Following this manifest weather vane delivered to the winds and meteorology, we are invited to a crossing of circles and worlds as likes to invent them.
A huge curtain comes alive with light zones
The spaces she invests in Fort Saint-Jean are open for the occasion revealing several installations where the video, the medium par excellence of the artist, finds a central place. At the will of a stroller popular with families, the curious in search of panorama on this site in height equipped with towers and round paths, it is possible to dive, just like the Icare-Us-she under the sea, to spread out on deep cushions to follow this magician: “Under the waves the souls are” is a fantasy where the colorful costumes are over-impressive sailors according to an exceptional sound and musical composition of Michael Harrison.
Immersed in this fiction that plays as well on words, as on visual lures and sound atmospheres, we are taken in the dark of the Saint-Jean du Fort chapel. We then penetrate into “Mire le Mirage” a cabinet of curiosity where a huge curtain comes alive with light zones revealing the glass reproductions of objects chosen in the Mucem background, such as ceramic whistles in the shape of a bird.
And even further, in the room of the Casemate, another episode mysteriously called “Into all that is here” (in everything that is here) takes up the fiction where Laure Prouvost is invented a grandfather explore of passages between the worlds. But the highlight of the show is in the baroque chapel of the old charity.
From the oval dome falls a vast suspension in the shape of a breast surrounded by a myriad of small glass fish of very realistic bill. After the effect of surprise, the whole starts to vibrate, luminous palpitations for the central element, of slight movements in the ban of sardines, a choir of children of the Conservatoire swells under the dome while on the sides testify the voices of the former inhabitants of this disinherited district, among the poorest until the 1970s, caught up by students of the neighboring EHESS.
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