Welcome to the Garden Festival #2, A new story

L’Agglomération Provence Verte is pleased to present to contemporary art center of Châteauvert the second edition of the festival of arts and ideas Welcome to the garden.

Second opus of the Festival launched in 2020 following the health crisis, Welcome to the garden, A new story is the first act of a program inviting the encounter between different stories arising in a garden of Provence Verte in the Haut-Var on the banks of a capricious river sometimes gigantic sometimes thin. A history of arts and encounters that takes root over the years 1980.

A story of landscapes and sculptures.

Of words, musical notes, of drawing, paint.

Ici, the landscape seems to encompass everything, or even swallow. This feeling is even more present in summer as the heat forms a soft blanket over the garden under which no one wants to move.. It's from this moment, conducive to dreams, that the art center team will use to offer visitors, accustomed or not, to build – write – invent the new stories that will inhabit this garden in the years to come.

We are going to question our ways of inhabiting nature and our relationships with the living. We are going to observe the different cohabitations that take place there between the insects, animals, pieces, the artists, visitors, the workers.

We are going to imagine which artists we want to invite and how the works cohabit with the landscape.

Will they marry him ?

Act in contrast ?

How do we use them? ?

Et, should we use it ?

Paradoxically, A new story begins inside the art center with the hanging of landscapes created by Rudy Ayoun during his residency in the fall 2021 at the art center as part of Cultural Summer set up by the Ministry of Culture.

These landscapes, the first that the artist made, invite visitors to go out and discover the garden where the label Toolong Records install it 9 July a giant screen to project a documentary that he designed as an unusual and offbeat road movie in the company of members of the groups LuneApache and Hal Manhar, looking for california, across the Var department… Varlifornia Dreamin is preceded by a concert by the group Hal Manhar.

The next day, Sunday 10 July, the art center team offers an initiation workshop to an artistic practice, it will be about clay with the association Pleine Terre.

Le 14 July is also dedicated to workshops.

The morning, Julien Bourgain, artist in residence at the art center during the month of July as part of a partnership with Art-O-Rama, invites children to discover his practice and will offer them a festive workshop.

The afternoon, the mediation team takes the public, young and old, build a hut in the garden echoing the huts made by Marc Chevalier, artist in residence at the art center in 2021, in the garden, at the sculpture-hut, named The episode, from Sarah Favriau which will be installed in September and of which a panel announces the future location like a real estate program, but also at Léna Durr's hut which is in the exhibition Wild Habitats.

Both artwork and setting, The episode, is designed in exterior/interior correspondence. These partitions, openly carved, keep track of the gesture, his history, his memory. For the public, it is about going beyond the envelope and discovering the interior of the work through its openings, frame, windows or door. It is around this same project that we will collectively imagine this new history of the garden on 15 July after reading texts echoing this work and the surrounding landscape. We will write and draw the(s) field of possibilities...

Le 16 July, it is a glass in hand that the oenologist Regine le Coz and the mediation team train visitors to discover the works of the garden in a round trip of knowledge, between mediation and tasting.

Next week, the 22-23 and 24 July, the art center team passes the baton to OUTREVERT, association of friends of the art center, for a new edition of FADA – Festival around art. The films chosen 24 July will be related to the exhibition Wild Habitats from Léna Durr.

Julien Bourgain will have spent the whole month of July in Châteauvert and delivers the 29 July a first restitution of this time of research that he will have spent with us. Meet, performance, dance or simple conversation, this first stage of restitution remains today impossible to describe or write.

At last, Caroline Brotons closes the festival on 30 July with a new version of MAP, landscape performance program, the patrimony, territories and walking. It is on this enchanted and poetic parenthesis that the second opus of Welcome to the Garden Festival, A new story will end. He will leave in our memories, no doubt, beautiful images and beautiful moments of exchange that will allow us to build this new story that will gradually inhabit the sculpture garden of Châteauvert.

Finally, tell you that all these artistic proposals are imagined in a friendly and inclusive way. Do not hesitate to inform us of any difficulties in accessing them..

The team of the contemporary art center of Châteauvert, April 2022

lydia, Aurelie, Candide, Prune, Oriane and Christophe