First Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans

It is a Biennial with new ideas and that tries to make a hole in the maremagnun of biennials that are celebrated all over the world. A biennial in which it is convenient to pay attention and from which we make a summary of your intentions, guests and proposals.

Inaugural edition of the Biennale D'architecture D'Orleans. Walking through someone else's dream.

The Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans is a «biennale de collection» constructed as a confluence of memory.- accrued memories (works of the collection) and future memories (those of the invited architects and artists). The memory of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire’s collection serves as the principal focus, to be rediscussed, its novelty rediscovered, its typologies redefined, and its narrative most certainly rewritten. The works produced by the architects will at times be the result of a dialogue with works from the collection.

The ensuing discussion between “ the established and the modern” will be articulated around two monographic exhibitions devoted, on one hand, to an historic artist from the collection, Guy Rottier, and on the other, to a contemporary architect, Patrick Bouchain. Guy Rottier’s monographic exhibition is an opportunity to discover the architect’s work and to bring new life to nonsensicality, radicality, transgression, but also subversive tenderness as a driving force for architectural and urbanistic innovation. The other exhibition will be devoted to the architect Patrick Bouchain, our guest of honour for this first edition.

Three catalogues summarize this first edition of the Biennale. First, a “book of intentions”, will be available at the inauguration, and will present the current state of research for each architect and artist. The second, available at the closing of the Biennale, will present the narratives imagined by invited writers while exploring and interacting the different works, with the third being a catalogue devoted to Patrick Bouchain’s work.

Architecture

Architecture is a system with the potential to ‘shape’ what individuals want, to interpret the spirit of a place. Architecture is a mental place before it becomes a reality. Architecture is no more than a number of places to recognise others.

Atlas

To exhibit places that have been built or merely plotted is, for us, an irresistible temptation to construct an Atlas of the areas that we would like to live in. Living is a particular form of the concept of having, a having so intense that it no longer has anything to do with possession. The Frac Centre-Val de Loire is resurrected as a place for overlooked potential, a heterotopic space and a laboratory of ideas, where forked pathways develop. Hoping that no end point is reached.

Exposition

The common thread between the works exhibited is the real need to break with any linguistic cohesion and representation: seeking in plural expressive complexity, not a formal, but a conceptual synthesis of reality. Courting poetical fragments, where each piece gains its autonomy, to see the myth of language crumble. The Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans celebrates the loss of focus and defines the value of a plethora. We must accept that scenes are excessively replicated, at different periods. This is a concentrated assemblage of distinct ideas that reconstruct a mosaic of reality. We advocate an exhibition of proximities: proximity modifies our perception of otherness. Proximity brings others closer, brings their scent, cruelty, fears and risks closer. But proximity is required for desire. We want a desirous biennale.

Guest artists and architects
 

The residences

Since 2016, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire has been developing an ambitious extra-mural program. Alongside the implementation of a new policy for disseminating and exhibiting the collection, this new development is also being asserted by a physical inclusion of artistic and architectural research, on a regional level, seen as a tangible space for experiments and new narratives.

MENGZHI ZHENG.- Mengzhi Zheng will be in residence at the Daumézon Departmental Hospital Centre (CHD) for the first three months of the Biennale, as part of the residency program set up in 2008 in partnership with the Frac Centre-Val de Loire. The artist will produce a site- specific work for the cultural venue of the CHD situated in Fleury-les-Aubrais.

SABA INNAB.- The Jordanian-Palestinian artist and architect Saba Innab will be in residence at La Box for the first three months of the Biennale and, in this setting, will produce a site-specific work for the Transpalette Contemporary Art Centre. Illustrating the strong relation between the ENSA Bourges, Transpalette, and the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, this work will join the Frac’s collection and be included in its permanent exhibition circuit at a regional level.

Biennale Symposia 

Lycees

Alongside the numerous programs proposed at Les Turbulences, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire is introducing a territorialized program aimed at different kinds of public (temporary shows, workshops, lectures...), and incorporated in the artistic and cultural education circuit. 

Today, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire includes the architectural future in a lasting way in the daily round, but also in the horizon of a school. In this respect, two experimental arrangements will be launched to mark the 2017 Architecture Biennale.

The Biennale in its city

The Biennale extends all over the city, within a circuit that passes through the historic heart of Orléans, in a dialogue with its architectural heritage. The forecourt of the Orléans Media centre, the Orléans Theatre, Rue Jeanne d’Arc, the collegiate church of Saint-Pierre-de-Puellier and many other public places and squares will be used to present novel architectural and artistic productions.

The Biennale in its region

The Architecture Biennale redeploys the founding gesture of the Frac to shape an area for exhibition where new synergies are beginning to emerge between art, places and inhabitants in a relationship encouraging proximity and porosity: it intends to impregnate and infiltrate reality by conveying duration, maturation and reach as active principles of creation and cultural democracy.

The curators