The air vibrates with the hum of insects

This wide-ranging group exhibition, combining works from the collection and invitations, offers a journey between reverie and debate on the relationship between man and his environment. The exhibition will trace the commitments of Land Art and Arte Povera to the artist’s presence in the landscape, the question of the sublime, and today’s awareness of the ecological and ecosophical dimension of the landscape.

Just 50 years ago, the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant defined the work of a whole new generation of transalpine artists as Arte Povera. This extraordinary phrase, itself borrowed by Celant from the Polish playwright Jerzy Grotowski, author in 1965 of the critical work ‘ Vers un théâtre pauvre’, defines both a desire to seek ‘the energy of matter’ through a stripping back of form and a search for ‘revolutionary potential’ in the context of the major social and economic demands of the late 1960s, in opposition to a certain American artistic hegemony with the minimal art and Pop Art movements.

Drawing on this dual attitude, which leads ‘to the essence, to primary energy’ and to maintaining a state of ‘guerrilla warfare’, the exhibition L’air vibre du bourdonnement des insectes (Air Vibrates from the Hum of Insects), through a wide selection of works from the 1960s to the present day, offers a twofold reflection on the nature and essence of things, while also carrying within it the seeds of ecosophical thinking.

L’air vibrates to the hum of insects, offering an open, non-chronological tour in which the Museum’s historic pieces from the Arte Povera (Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Giuseppe Penone) and Land Art disciplines engage in dialogue with the Museum’s latest acquisitions (Michael E. Smith, Gianni Pettena, Julien Discrit) as well as with a number of guest artists (Nina Canell, Edith Dekyndt, Jo-ey Tang). The aim is not so much to explore the legacy of a poor art form as to propose a continuum of ideas between the poetics of the banal and the political gesture.

L’air vibre du bourdonnement des insectes borrows its title from a work by Pier Paolo Calzolari produced in 1970, characteristic of his rudimentary installations combining frost, lead and light. Beyond the research into the states of matter, it is above all this desire to listen to the trivial, to pay attention to the most insignificant gestures and to take account of the living that guides the first part of the exhibition. The exhibition then moves on to explore the experience of the frontier, artificiality and recycling, as part of a possible archaeology of humanity.

The exhibition also includes a special production by the artist Ignasi Aballi, who is reviving his work En el aire specifically for Château de Rochechouart.

This exhibition has benefited from generous loans from the Centre national des arts plastiques, the FRAC Lorraine and the FRAC d’Occitanie, as well as the galleries Greta Meert (Brussels), Anne-Sarah Benichou (Paris), Joseph Tang (Paris), Salle Principale (Paris), Frank Elbaz (Paris) and KOW (Berlin).