Laura Erber

The Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, designed by Aldo Rossi and Xavier Fabre, is characterized by emblematic architecture and a landscape of exceptional force and beauty. One of the most unique institutions in the French and international artistic landscape, the Centre d’art de l’île de Vassivière is very strongly committed to experimentation, diffusion, creation, exchange and education as regards the relations between the visual arts, the environment and landscapes.

Within the framework of the Brazil Year in France, the Centre international d’art et du paysage promotes the first personal exhibition of artist Laura Erber to open the programs conceived by the new director, Chiara Parisi.

The curator of the exhibition, writer Federico Nicolao, invited Laura Erber to make use of the space created by Italian architect Aldo Rossi on Vassivière lake.

Artist and writer already known in Europe on account of her activities at the National Studio at Fresnoy and the Musée de la Ville de Paris, as well as at the Schloss Solitude Academy in Stuttgart, Laura Erber now engages in a work that explores the borders between the various languages that make up her art. Different media are resorted to: photography, cinema, poetry.

Envisaged as mental spaces for creation and mysterious places for representation, the lake at Vassivière and the high plains of the Sertão, one of Brazil’s vast regions, come together in the artist’s imaginary universe. They constitute the starting point of an exhibition that offers the spectator the chance to proceed to an observation of the numerous and even contradictory statements, fictions and phantasies that such places evoke in each of us. The different possibilities of modulating a space for creation thus becomes the concrete and metaphorical object of the exhibition.

The exhibition also offers a very small and mysterious museum, the Nano Museum of curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, invited by Laura Erber and Federico Nicolao in a curious and amusing partnership with the Centre international d’art et du paysage.

The building of the Centre international d’art et du paysage – a sort of ship displaced on terra firma – functions as a generous sound box both for Laura Erber’s works and for the interventions of guests such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist and his Nano Museum, Tom Zé, Aziz Ab´Sáber, Joaquim Guedes, Maria de Lourdes Davies Freitas, Anna Mariani and Clémentine Baert, who, by means of a process of dislocations and translations and an original appeal to memory and imagination, create all the zones that converge with the exhibition.

Illustrated catalogue with texts by Alain Fleischer, Paulo Sérgio Duarte and a discussion between Laura Erber and Federico Nicolao, edited by Silvana Editoriale (Milan). Art direction Paola Manfrin. French, Brazilian and English editions

The Centre international d´art et du paysage enjoys the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication / Drac Limousin, the Limousin Regional Council, the la Creuse General Council and the Vassivière en Limousin (SYMIVA) Regional and Inter-departmental Mixed Syndicate.

Pressetext

Laura Erber
Kurator: Federico Nicolao