. . . Ar(t)mature . . .
Chalon-sur-Saône former industrial harbor is reactivated by on-site artists during the Chalon dans la rue festival. We were invited to do an installation in a open-air, concrete enclosed, 700m2 site wedged between the river and a steel rebars factory. Collaborating with this latter, we decided to plant a steel forest. Springing up from the seemingly derelict concrete sterile ground, a forest made of of steel rebars formed a field of bending truncs and steel meshes canopies floating above-ground and moving in the wind. This new artificial landscape, although actually made of 3 tons of rough concrete reinforcement rebars, became a diamond in the rough, a poetic space, a new industrial fiction, right in the middle of the ruins of the formerly glorious French industrial landscape.
The artificiality of the trees put forward a completely different set of values, a displacement of the typical understanding of things. Hidden reinforcements are exposed, strengthening rebars are made soft, almost fragile, heavy steel grids become light, floating on thin bending posts, and an abandoned place becomes a site under reconstruction. Ar(t)mature, following the continuous experiments the artist Xavier Juillot's perfoms on this site, is a gentle provocation, a call for questionning the consensus on our cities so-called derelict industrial sites. We believe that those fringe spaces represent fantastic opportunities for experimental artistic practices and the building-up of an ever-richer urban imaginaire.
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