Itinerary Estuaire Nantes <> Saint -Nazaire

Observatorium aspires to bracketing off our everyday life and placing it in parks and natural spaces where every individual could take the time to immerse him/herself, because "perceiving our environment is impossible without first looking at oneself". Indeed, the Rotterdam collective favours the use of their artwork by inviting the population to appropriate them in their own way.

This project is borne out of questioning the raison d'être of this natural enclave. Next to the train station, this space was the site of heavy bombing during the Second World War. In the 1970s, the project for a city motorway was drawn up and the gravel used for the foundations of the Tour Bretagne, in construction at the time, was used as ballast for the future highway... When the project was abandoned, nature took over, and the site is now home to an exceptional biodiversity which has gained it the nickname "The little Amazon".

Observatorium illustrates this story using a "fairy tale of progress": "If a project for a highway eventually allowed nature to thrive, our project will allow one to enter urban zones even further". They have created a massive wooden sculpture of a tronçon of highway on which we might invent a simple and convivial life to replace urban traffic. As usual, they have created ties with the local population because "art can first and foremost create time and space for people to pay attention to the world and to the internal resonances our experiences can acquire."

First a painter, Ange Leccia then went on to use the video as his creative medium. His “arrangements”, as he likes to call them, are born out of the people he meets and of a specific alteration of still images and moving images; these can either be torn, slowed down or cut.

Artwork of Estuaire 2009

François Morellet creates here an ever-changing piece, hence avoiding the vision of an unchanging artistic proposition. Through the use of three different luminous visual presentations, clouds (white curve), the sun (red circles) or the rain (blue dashes), this piece will inform the locals on the weather conditions 4 hours in advance.

From the Ile de Nantes, so as to display an overview of the heritage that is being created on the estuary territory, the "Prouvé Station" places at your disposal: a full size map of the territory, description sheets of the works of art and of the artists, catalogs, photographic resources of the construction sites, dvd collection, audio tour...
16 shorts films, written by Gaëtan Chataigner (a musician and a film maker), take a fresh look on each of these creations.
Film show: everyday at nightfall until november 2011

Since graduating from the École des beaux-arts de Nantes where they first met, the two artists, known for their drawings, have never left each other's side and have built an international career together. In the room they designed for in the Château du Pé for Estuaire, the black paint of the ceiling drips over the walls, and the night invades the day. The same could be said for their work in general, where dreams seem to take over reality. Looking at their drawing is like trying to follow a line of logic in a dream – it is based in reality but it is deformed, and they infuse this with a joyful or disturbing fantasy. Driven by a desire to open up the field of drawing, they also make animation films, wall-drawings, or installations in which they include a sculpture. Their piece for the cliffs of the Butte Sainte-Anne is their first autonomous sculpture. Lunar Tree takes the form of a perfectly white dead tree, 12 m (40 feet) tall. By day, when seen from Square Maurice-Schwob, it rises out of the river; at night, from the tip of Île de Nantes (at the foot of the grey crane), a halo of light emanates from each of the tree's branches, which surges out against the black background. Shape and colour make the tree look like a drawing with volume in space.

In the hamlets of Bouguenais, Port Lavigne occupies a unique status thanks to its location, deep in the wet prairies. Near the shipyard, a promenade runs alongside the Loire, lined with tall trees (often covered in mistletoe) and paths with luxurious vegetation. Despite its proximity to an airport, Nantes' ring-road, and ports, Port Lavigne is a vast natural domain. It is precisely this site's capacity to whisk us away to another time, another era, and another world that attracted Sarah Sze.
The Settlers, a work that is spread out over the art trail, invites one to explore and to feel the site. Three trees are literally "colonized" by a group of sculptures, creating a series of encounters that are improbable in our part of the world: in one, a bear cub climbs on a tree stump, helped by its mother; in the second, a jaguar lounges about; and, in the last one, a colony of monkeys swing from the third tree. Every animal is portrayed doing something natural: hunting, washing, playing, or sleeping.
The sculptures, perfectly realistic and visible from the river and the bank, are black and appear to be shadows. For the artist, "they play with the idea of a desire for a return to nature and the wild."

A castle built on a mound, dominating on one side a pond and on the other the vast marshes of the Loire: the setting immediately evokes the world of fairy tales. Inside, a magnificent bestuary, pieces of furniture hidden in the walls, a talking window, shapes coming out of the walls: one can also enter the bedrooms thought up by the artists in the fairy tale way.

The visitor who sits on the bench becomes the catalyst for an incredible quatic event: a 20 metre high jet of water is propelled into the air. When the visitor gets up from the bench, the fountain disappears.

His work invites the spectator to look for art in the movements of daily life and in particular conditions of existance: physical, spiritual, psychological and political. Full of humour, his sculptures tip ordinary moments over into an absurd universe. Obsessed by human capacity to "sculpturally" transform, he applies those human characteristics (thinness, obesity) to social features, like a car or a house. For him, objects, like human, undergo a throught process.

Paimbœuf is like a life-size adventure book, cast in a maritime past. Based on the riverbank of the Loire, the "star-studded garden", soon to be classified "remarkable garden of the Loire-Atlantique", is an ideal place to contemplate the landscape. Team Zoo is a variable association of architects created in Takamasa Yoshizaka's workshop at Waseda University in Tokyo. It is made up of around ten teams, which were spun off from two original groups, Mobile Workshop founded in 1969 by Kinya Maruyama, then the ZO Workshop in 1971. For Team Zoo, a construction is not an object – it is a place for discussion, an integration tool, which must, like an item of clothing, not hinder movement and, like a landscape, evolve with time. Based on the constellation of Ursa Minor and the four cardinal points, architect-artist-landscape designer Kinya Maruyama used vernacular materials to build Le Jardin étoilé. Visitors experience this space: here, you can walk, play, sit, breathe, or reflect. Created for Estuaire 2007, Le Jardin has also been able to evolve. In 2012, Kinya Maruyama further embedded the garden in its natural element: the changes made to it are primarily vegetal.

Saint-Brévin is made up of two seaside towns: Saint-Brévin-l'Océan and, to the north, Saint-Brévin-les-Pins which stretches out between two hills topped by old forts. At the tip of the Nez de Chien fort, at "the lateral limit of the ocean" (the border where the river and ocean meet), Huang Yong Ping's (1954, China) skeleton of an enormous sea-serpent surges out of the sea, as if it had just been found in an archaeological dig. Its movement makes it look alive: with its disproportionate body, one imagines that it crossed the seven seas before washing up on this beach. The shape of its spine echoes the curve of the Saint-Nazaire bridge, and the way it sits is reminiscent of the architecture of les carrelets, the distinctive off-shore fisheries on the Atlantic coast. By having a major figure from Chinese mythology appear on European shores, Huang Yong Ping examines, the notions of identity and cultural hybridity, as is often the case in his work. The environmental question is also very present in his art where he regularly exposes the paradox of the man sawing the branch he is sitting on, torn between creative abilities and destructive impulses. This is one of the many possible interpretations of this work: placed on the beach, the skeleton appears with the tide and, little by little, will be home to marine fauna and flora.

The divisions of the shapes above and below this line split the landscape into different sequences. The artist reveals a shape painted on a single level, a shape that detaches from and places itself on top on the architecture to which til seems to belong. Leaving the viewpoint on the terrace now means experiencing the third dimension and seeing the explosion of the figure.

Appearing suddenly from the concrete of the base, 107 aspens with bright leaves sway in the wind. Having the base to scintillate and quiver is the first intention - poetic intention- of Gilles Clément, who sees in the base a place of resistance, where the ecological diversity of the estuary can reside in.

The building site of the Observatory started in 2007 with the end of the path:little by little, the visitor rises in the middle of the reed beds and reaches a vast platform where a tower is built. In 2009, the artist rounded up the construction by adding a wooden path in the surrounding meadows and reed beds that were drawing the line between the tower and the village. Tadashi Kawamata created her a little path out of wood, 40cm above the ground, which is embedded in the marsh and seems to float in the natural environnement.

For Estuaire 2009, Tatzu Nishi produced his first perennial creation at Bouée (accessible via Cordemais). Referring to the imposing "iron castle", he created an identical copy of one of the tower of the power station: a 15m high tower on the riverbank.

Visually stunning, Tatzu Nishi's piece engages with our ability to imagine reality. It starts like a Jules Verne's novel: where does this house come from? Are the power station's chimneys copies of this relic?

Small garden accessible from 2.00 p.m to 6.00 p.m each sundays.

Coming out of the river, he creeps and stands up to face the Loire river, "mouth wide open". PVC tubing and the representation of a snake are recurrent materials and themes in Jimmie Durham's work. The snake symbolizes the river and the tube stands for a canal for imagination; this piece is an attempt to fragment - by linking them - space and hierarchy: water/sky, above/below, visible/invisible, past/future...