Cyane Findji
About
 Contact

Moving  matters
Flowers of the Glacier
Amphibia
Insularias
Sounding Sound
Le feu tue les yeux de la Nuit
Cam
Y

Curatorial
*intent*
Navigating Turbulence
Elon Kierre
Scrying into a Shell
Ballard in Albisola

News

Ballard in Albisola
Art Exhibition
03.09-19.12.2021 / Casa Jorn, Albissola Marina (IT) Curation and production: Paul Bernard and Cyane Findji (MAMCO), Luca Bochicchio, Stella Catteneo, and Daniele Pannucci (Casa Jorn).
Participants: Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Stéphanie Cherpin, Beatrice Delcorde, David Evrard, Claire FitzGerald, Jill Gasparina, Federico Nicolao, Julie Portier, Denis Savary, Ambroise Tièche, Sarah Tritz. 
Artworks by: Angela Bulloch, Guy de Cointet et Robert Whilite, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gordon Matta-Clark, Eduardo Paolozzi, Philippe Parreno.  


With the support of Comune di Albissola Marina, Les Amis du MAMCO, Fonds d’art contemporain de la ville de Genève, Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain, Genève, Centre national des arts plastiques, Wallonie-Bruxelles International, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
At the same period Asger Jorn was building his house and the first sections of motorway were being installed in the 1970s, the English author J.G. Ballard was concluding his "urban disaster" trilogy, the three short novels that remain his most famous. Two of them—Crash and High-Rise—were adapted to film with varying degrees of success. No one has dared tackle the third novel yet—Concrete Island—a critical tale of urban survival. Having driven over the guardrail of the motorway, Maitland, the main protagonist, crashes onto a titular concrete island below—a wasteland amongst underpasses. Completely isolated from the rest of the world, his only means to survive is to recreate his former existence from the scraps of consumer society.

This novel forms the backdrop for Ballard in Albisola. Beyond metaphorical narrative links (a makeshift world below the motorway), the evocation of this novel within the context of Jorn’s house raises a series of parameters, in the manner of a contradictory collage: one which imagines concrete within a land of ceramics, brings the remnants of an urban disaster to the seaside, proposes to turn your back to the sea to face the motorway, and to play out a "speculative fiction in the present tense" (as Concrete Island was described) in a "kind of inverted Pompei" (to quote Debord’s famous words on Casa Jorn). Original text published on mamco.ch

© cyane findji 2025
Index   Next →