PROFILES

“At one time or another, who hasn’t had the urge to bring home with them a souvenir, a fragment during a nature walk or a trip abroad?” asks Anne-Laure Wuillai. This Beaux-Arts de Paris graduate chose to leave the urban density of Paris for the Côte d’Azur, to work close to the sea and mountain tops in collaboration with local artists, scientific and cultural actors. Her studio housed in La Station in Nice looks more like a chemist’s laboratory. Here, she preserves fragments of the Mediterranean taken in a performative, wild and dreamlike gesture, recorded in photographs. This visual artist, represented by the Eva Vautier Gallery, has developed an approach between science, poetry, and irony. “I like to question our ways of inhabiting the world, the norms we create to bring everything to our scale. The way we domesticate water, the sky too, elements whose immensity is in every way beyond us,” continues the artist, who has chosen to exaggerate classification to the point of absurdity, the better to challenge our ways of comprehending, categorising, and consuming our environment. In her series Hyper-Conditionnement, she fills a shopping trolley with bags of seawater. And in her series Les Artificiels, she creates furniture that sets flashy waves in motion, referring to the clichés we have of the colour of the water. She uses the 53 shades of blue in the sky identified by Saussure for his cyanometer, one of the first meteorological instruments, in an eminently poetic gesture. She designs snow globes in which plastic waste from the coastline dances or postcards soaked in water, like memories carried away... but for how long? By the grotesque, she leaves the militant gesture to produce a work that invites us to dream of another relationship with water, the sky and the earth, this living body.

By Tanja Stojanov