20 years
Autumn 2011
The Centre international d’art et du paysage is a national and international emblematical example amongst contemporary art centres in France, Kunsthalle in Germany, Galleria Civica in Italy,… which have become privileged actors in the transmission of actual arts. They are ideal places of production and presentation of works hardly visible and achievable in otherwise more traditional structures. Those public institutions, not intended for conservation, are allowing a full and complete artistic experimentation.
Unlike museums, the Art Centre has no permanent collection. It invests in the risk of inviting artists to create projects specifically for the island, the territory and the building. It is a relation to creation more exciting where experimentation is essential. On the Vassivière island, this strong will to create takes even greater significance, it somehow became the territory of art.
The main strength of Vassivière Island is the place itself: an island of about 70 acres entirely devoted to art and contemporary creation, with a stunning building, unique in France, the Centre international d’art et du paysage. Vassivière Island, an artificial island as much as a symbolic one is an ideal platform for meetings and exchanges, a place where one can explore and discover new practices.
Designed by the architects Aldo Rossi and Xavier Fabre, the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière opened his doors in 1991. After twenty years of experiences and creations, the Art Centre is pleased to announce the opening of the skatepark OTRO by Koo Jeong-A and the submarine SubTiziano by Alexander Ponomarev in the heart of his sculptures’ wood spreading on both the island and on the shores of the lake Vassivière. and the
Issued from a public commission, OTRO is an audacious skatable artwork designed by the korean artist Koo Jeong-A to be lived and experienced not only from a sporting point of view but also from a sensitive, sensory and artistic perspective.
Its ovoid shape, the use of phosphorescent green concrete, its progressive discovery, its integration into the island’s meadow make this work a unique, friendly and playful proposition.
From the Canal Grande in Venice, where he has been presented for several months during the Biennale Venice in 2009, the submarine SubTiziano by the russian artist Alexander Ponomarev, a former marine and naval engineer, emerges on the shores of the lake Vassivière, becoming its home harbour.
Within this island entirely dedicated to art and to the development of the idea of landscape, the Art Center promoted and displayed for the last twenty years a strong combination of dreamed and realised architectures, with the Aldo Rossi’s building, the Yona Friedman’s environmental sculpture or the Kengo Kuma’s ephemeral pavilion but also with the creation of Hans Walter Müller’s inflatable modules and the researches by Gilles Clément and Philippe Rahm which produced respectively a landscape charter and an architectural charter for Vassivière’s territory.
Today, the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière gets a new architectural proposal, opening in the castle directly across from the main building, its artists’ residencies designed by the architects Berger & Berger and BuildingBuilding.
Copyright: Cyrpien Gaillard, Jean-Christophe Radke, Graphism: deValence