10 must-see works to see during A Summer in Le Havre 2024

For a summer in Le Havre 2024, the municipal team, under the artistic direction of Gaël Charbau, seems well-established: the program, without a real common thread, exhibits around fifteen works, which are added to the 18 perpetuated from previous years. “ Every summer, through the prism of contemporary art, Le Havre becomes a trendy destination between beach and culture, where exhibitions and urban explorations mix, all with your feet in the waterenthuses Mayor Edouard Philippe. Each artist who creates a work inspired by Le Havre leaves his mark on the city. “. A short, non-exhaustive overview of 10 works exhibited during this 8th edition, which make up the magic of this great ephemeral mass of contemporary art, to be visited until September 22, 2024.

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1. Cutsby Isabelle Cornavo

This very beautiful work welcomes the visitor upon arrival at the station. Isabelle Cornaro was inspired here by the Saint-Joseph church and imagined a double rereading of it. On the one hand, the artist intervened on the large bay windows, which she declined in a color chart reminiscent of the stained glass windows of the religious building designed by Marguerite Huré. Penetrated by sunlight, the colored tiles offer a multitude of shades on the floor that play differently depending on the time of day and the clouds. On the other, on the square, she placed an oxidized bronze sculpture four meters high, a replica of the bell tower of the same church, like an incomplete fragment whose geometric lines can be seen up close. This work is intended to be sections of the city’s history, elements taken which have become autonomous.

2. The Moon landed in Le Havreby Arthur Gosse

A lunar project. The Earth’s natural satellite crashed in Le Havre and rests, without gravity, in a romantic setting, one of the pools of the Saint-Roch square. An allegorical, astonishing, dreamlike and beautiful work that has won the hearts of the inhabitants. The night star perhaps tells a similar story to that of the port city. Its surface evokes the granular concrete of the reconstructed buildings in the city center. And the comparison does not stop there: “ Le Havre is like the moon, it’s gray, it’s far, no one goes there and yet it’s a fascinating place “, breathes Arthur Gosse, a young graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art & Design Le Havre-Rouen (ESADHaR). His work was first displayed in 2021. Acclaimed by the public, it now has a permanent home. ” The moon, intriguing and mysterious, shares with Le Havre more than a common past, with its surface impacted by stellar debris that recall the 1944 bombings suffered by the city. “, continues the artist. At night, lighting creates a crescent and reveals the volume of the craters. A very moody work, in short.

3. Peacefulpar Edgar Sorin

Quai de Marseille, in this rapidly changing neighborhood that astonishes with the feeling of grandeur it imposes, this patinated bronze sculpture consists of the repetition of an amphora that is stacked nine times on itself to reach a height of more than eight meters. These ancient objects contained at the time many goods, loaded onto ships that sailed on the Mediterranean… Like the current containers, so numerous in this port of Le Havre. Edgar Sarin wanted to recreate this form, like a fault in time, repeating the line of the amphora like so many cargoes that we see on the transporters in the distance. A metaphor for the globalized economy. One of the great difficulties is to be fair on the scale of the city, without being pretentioushe explains. Because the writing of this city is complex, made of juxtaposed districts, extended then dense. As an artist you have to know how to measure it. »

4. In betweenby Emmanuelle Ducrocq

On a triangle of lawn traced by avenue Foch and boulevard François Ier, between the cycle paths, the tramway and car traffic, a series of tall rotating masts are deployed which carry recovery chairs at their ends. Or 25 seats given by residents, each representing a district of the city, which move according to the wind. Emmanuelle Ducrocq varnished them with a photosensitive material, so that their surface reflects light throughout the day and even in the evening, when they become phosphorescent. Through this work, the artist imposes the desire to change point of view, since these high-perched seats are contemplated while walking in this triangle of lawn, showing objects which stand out from the sky or from a Perret building.

5. The Affection Waveby Joël Andrianomearisoa

On two emblematic sites of the city, Joël Adrianomearisoa offers a poetic work visible to all applied in illuminated letters on the facades of the Bains des Docks and the University Library. “ On the infinite wave the theater of our affections is played out ”, we can thus read in large, as well as: “ On the twilight of time our eternal promises are outlined “. Sentences that respond to each other and constitute the two poles of a poem illuminated as soon as night falls. Inspired by his origins, the Malagasy artist seeks in his work to give form to non-explicit, often abstract stories. But he did not stop there, since he also wanted to disseminate fragments of texts in different places in the city, and in particular in the books of the library where he hid poems that are just waiting to be discovered, thus proposing different scales to his work.

6. On the roofby the collective On the roof

This co-production between the Cité des sciences and industry and A Summer in Le Havre is located all summer on the top floor of the Les Docks car park. A seven-metre-high garden-work constructed using scaffolding, which offers an unprecedented panorama of the city, as far as Honfleur and Deauville. This belvedere links the port and the city, two entities that have turned their backs on each other for five centuries. Designed as a micro-urban forest, the work invites you to stroll, introspect and contemplate, in a place that would not lend itself to it at first glance. It is the fruit of a collective composed of architects and landscapers from Le Havre. In September, the work will be reconfigured to adapt to the spaces adjoining the northern forecourt of the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris.

7. The city that didn’t existpar Grégory Chatonsky

A summer in Le Havre was held this year to highlight the relationship between art and artificial intelligence. The artist Grégory Chatonsky, pioneer of AI, presents three projects this year: a series of volumes of purple concrete printed in 3D, scattered throughout public space, whose psychedelic effect echoes the shapes that we discovered out of the 25,000 unique postcards distributed last year during the previous edition. In his second proposal, these same surrealist postcards are the subject of an installation at MuMa, as part of the exhibition “Photographing in Normandy”, proposed by the museum. The voice of the Franco-Canadian, synthesized by AI, describes and analyzes these 25,000 images. Finally, an animated film called HAVEN is also screened in the Théâtre de l’Hôtel de Ville gallery. A dreamlike and disturbing film where texts, images and music are co-created with the help of artificial intelligence.

8. The Bird Hotelpar Ad Minoliti

To Minoliti continues his series of works intended for ” non-human visitors “. This is about the Bird Hotel installed in the Hanging Gardens, a botanical park built on the site of an old fort, which overlooks the city. This work takes the form of a large, six-meter-high, colored parallelepiped totem, placed on an embankment, which is intended to be of a “ non-binary geometry », language dear to the Argentinian artist. Behind the facade of this totem there is a nesting box for birds as well as water troughs. Around it, benches in the colors of the totem poles are arranged for the walker to rest.

9. No Reason to Moveby Max Coulon

It’s a bold proposal so naive does it seem at first glance. No Reason to Move is a house that is both childish and haunted, a cabin with large carved wooden legs, straight out of a comic strip. Its windows, like eyes, seem to scrutinize the visitor, the little house itself being perched on the roof of the Bassin du Roy maneuver building. In direct proximity to the urban environment, the cabin contrasts with the surrounding architecture, offering a unique perspective on the Perret buildings and the nearby Tour Alta.

10. Water busespar Cosmo Danchin-Hamard

Public transport too participate in this major cultural event. Ten buses within the LiA transport network will circulate across the city, fully dressed in the Bateaux-Bus series from Cosmo Danchin-Hamard which wanted to introduce public transport and maritime heritage. Large reproductions of emblematic boats: Liners Normandie and Washington, Drague and Brittany Ferry cross the port city to Étretat. The Le Havre illustrator wanted to depict the regular ballet of ships entering and leaving the port.

> A summer in Le Havre 2024, until September 22. More info here.

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