Exposition “Night crossing” by Martine FEIPEL & John BECHAMEIL

The Châteauvert contemporary art center reopens its doors after several months of work on 7 July 2023 with the first exhibition in a cultural institution in the south of France by the duo Martine Feipel and Jean Béchameil.

Night crossing began a month before the opening of the exhibition with a performance – filming of a participatory walk with around fifty people from all walks of life which took place at dusk in the vicinity of the art center.

Tribute to yesterday's migrations, today and tomorrow, Night Crossing refers to the population movements recounted by the Greek physician Ctesias from the 5th century BC., population displacements of all times, to Gandhi's salt march in 1930 or that of Mao Tse Toung in 1934 but also at the refugee marches in the Darien jungle in Panama, jungle they cross at the risk of their lives to reach the United States, without forgetting the increasingly risky migrations that lead to Europe by paths and detours that change with the sandstone of controls.

Tribute to nature, Night Crossing speaks on behalf of an absentee who cannot speak for himself when “we are in the midst of a climate crisis and growth, the economy and the very values ​​of work are called into question.

Martine Feipel & Jean Béchameil have long reflected on the heritage of modernism while raising its ambivalence, today they underline the place of all living beings as central and question in an optimistic way, the fact that living beings are not limited to inhabiting this or that geographical space but to being a soil that is constantly changing and adapting to nature.

Opening Friday 7 July from 5 p.m.

Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil are an artist duo based in Brussels, representative of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Inhabited by a great sensitivity to the theatricality of the world and its beauties, combining their many skills – design , sculpture, engineering, staging, décor (including several films by Lars von Trier) – Feipel and Bechameil produce a work that is as formally accomplished as it is strongly committed. They offer food for thought for a better future.

NIGHT CROSSING was supported by KULTUR LX, of the Independence by Bil Foundation and of Wallonia-Brussels International (WBI) / CWB Paris, Center Wallonia-Brussels/Paris – Outside the Walls Constellations.