Do you know the Country of Arbresle ? A small corner of the countryside in the Rhône department, this community of communes experienced a major upheaval during the 2010s when its territory saw the realization of the A89 motorway project, which now links Lyon to Bordeaux. Although very useful, the motorway generated a major construction site and led to a profound upheaval of the landscapes. “The community of communes then had the idea of proposing a route of works of art that could repair this scar on the territory “, explains Romain Weber, artistic director of Whispers of Time.
For that is the name of this brand new rural art trailwhich opens this summer with eight initial installations, while three more – by Ugo Schiavi, Charlotte Charbonnel and Thierry Boutonnier – are expected to join them at the end of the year. Romain Weber, representing Maison Gutenberg, a Lyon-based organisation that carries out artistic projects, worked for the occasion with the École urbaine de Lyon to design a reflection on the anthropocene and “propose a route that raises awareness of the ecological realities of the territory”.
A scientific investigation to lay the foundations
“We wanted to encourage walking, to merit the encounter with the works, which are not all next to each other.”
Their research began, he explains, with a major survey of the specific scientific issues in the Pays de l’Arbresle. “We did not want an artistic project disconnected from this territory. The circuits allow us to highlight its heritage in all its diversitywhile seeking to raise awareness of the disruptions at work, here and elsewhere.
Didier Marcel, The Golden Column
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Eleven locations were chosen, in the centre of villages, lost in the vineyards or taking over a tunnel under the famous A89 motorway. Three circuits were finally designed for linking the works togetherand allow visitors, on foot or by bike, to discover them in two to three hours. “We wanted to encourage walking, to merit the encounter with the works, which are not all next to each other.”
Artists facing a territory
Among the works already visible, let us mention that of Laurent Pernot (born in 1980), spectacular and moving, depicting a young boy perched on a rocky spur. The artist intends here to summon the memory of different floodswho would have dug and forever marked the memory of this rock. For his part, Didier Marcel (born in 1961) joins the imagination of architecture with a column made from molds of straw bales. A “agricultural monument” which marks the entrance to the forest, just as Julie Escoffier (born in 1989), the youngest and most local of the selected artists, responds to the vine which surrounds her work with a sculptural reflection on acid rain which pollute crops…
In the tunnel under the highway mentioned above, it is the audacious Vahan Soghomonian (born in 1982) who imagines a musical workwhose notes are triggered by the passage of cars above the visitors’ heads; poems are also generated by the work, composed of words collected by the artist during mediations in a hospital. A poignant installationwhich clearly expresses the mission of the group (“to repair the wound created by the highway”) and the always delightful way that artists have of working with what already exists, and of sublimating it.
