Meeting with Gaël Charbau, Artistic Director of the Nuit

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Meeting with Gaël Charbau, artistic director of the Nuit Blanche 2018, art critic and curator by Chloé Guennou& smArty "to share this journey into today's art with as many people as possible." As the 17th Nuit Blanche is about to unveil itself to Parisians, Gaël Charbau, on the occasion of the opening of one of the highlights of the event, the exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of the Collège des Bernardins, which he also curates, went back over the DNA of this formidable dream machine dear to Parisians. Sprinkled with "constellations" according to the red thread he has imagined, this Nuit Blanche 2018 is set in the heart of the capital's emblematic places, some more enigmatic than others. Abdelkader Benchamma for the 10th anniversary of the Collège des Bernardins and the Nuit Blanche (Sleepless Night) The installation, coupled with a number of events, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Collège des Bernardins, contemporary art having always been present over the years. If during my previous police stations we had, with the director of cultural programming, Hervé de Vaublanc, rather concentrated on the former sacristy, we wanted to reinvest the space of the Nave. A rather majestic space through this Cistercian architecture and the work deployed, of Abdelkader Benchamma both part of the 10 years of the College and the Nuit Blanche. Entitled "Echoes of the Birth of Worlds", it is based on the work of an astro-physicist priest, Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), one of the first to theorize the big bang, which earned him some mockery from other scientists at the time, whereas today this theory is recognized as fundamental in laying the groundwork for the birth of humanity. Georges Lemaître had this intuition of a universe that was both infinite and expanding. The artist has chosen to pay homage to his research by projecting throughout the Nave a drawing of almost 700m² on the entire floor, which in its peculiar writing, the artist working only in black and white simulates through a series of abstract motifs, a kind of fragmentation that escapes the first glance. The spectator is then forced to walk, walk through, cross the Nave to apprehend the whole, just like our point of view on the universe in which we evolve and the world around us, perpetually unstable and resistant to global view and understanding. This choice for Abdelkader was obvious. I had already invited him for the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie as part of a long-term commission, which he had condensed around "dark matter" through this same graphic vocabulary. It therefore seemed natural to call on him again because he is part of this connection between art and science, without being scientific, or pretending to be, but bringing a graphic and poetic echo to his research. If we were to sum up in a few key words the DNA of this 17th Nuit Blanche It is first of all a geographical deployment throughout Paris that allows us to rediscover the capital, at least I hope so, through classic places and others that I imagined more unexpected. I drew 4 routes that I renamed "constellations" always in this metaphor of science and stars that have a different hold each time, preferring to emphasize contrasts rather than coherence, to show how this city often wrongly qualified as a museum city offers on the contrary a great diversity of landscapes. -A first route takes us from the Halles to the Bernardins, drawing a constellation in the Paris of the Middle Ages through the Ile Saint Louis, which will be one of the highlights of this Nuit Blanche, the island being closed to traffic to become the scene of a great performance orchestrated by Edgar Sarin all night long, in the form of a procession. -The 2nd route takes us from the Army Museum to the bottom of the Champs Elysees over 1 kilometer that we will entirely pedestrianize and trace by golden ribbon, ("Mon Super Kilometre" from studio UY077), along the lawns of the Invalides, the Grand and Petit Palais and the Pont Alexandre III offered to the philanthropic platform "Thanks for Nothing", to the Espace Cardin/Théâtre de la Ville on the Place de la Concorde. -The 3rd constellation encompasses the entire Parc de la Villette and all its institutions: the Philharmonie, the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, the Géode, the Trabendo, the Cabaret Sauvage, the Paris Villette theatre... everyone having responded favourably to the call, it's going to be huge! -The 4th route is around the Porte Dorée with the immigration museum with Benjamin Loyauté, the Lycée Elisa Lemonnier with Eric Minh, the tramway Porte de Vincennes and the Paris Zoological Park with Philippe Quesne and Laurent Le Deunff. This first, geographical distribution was a response to the desire to be very ambitious in their career paths and the second key to the approach of this Nuit Blanche is emergence, having chosen to give this Nuit Blanche to artists who have rarely worked on these scales. I wanted to make this bet with them to succeed in this crossing of the contemporary imagination. Before Nuit Blanche and after? Another ambition, I wanted to multiply projects that are not only ephemeral, open beforehand and register long afterwards, as here at the Bernardins with this exhibition which opens 3 days before the Nuit Blanche and lasts until November 10th and also in Gare de Lyon, Hall 2 where the event will take place over several weeks. Since yesterday the travelers are captured by the immersive installation of the Tropicool Compagny, entitled "the sun rises and sets without obstacles" by Florian Viel and Jonathan Chauveau. The idea is to make passengers' journeys more enjoyable, as the stations give off a strong sense of imagination. An enigmatic pink flamingo skeleton hovers, while a gradation of colours accompanies the sun's course over the glass roof, caressing the passengers' eyes and creating an enveloping and inspiring atmosphere. Let's come back to the 5th edition of the Bourse Révélations Emerige, around 11 artists selected with the accompaniment this year of the Jérôme Poggi gallery. With each edition we try to remain very open to these new practices offering a wide panorama of creation, even if with Jérôme Poggi we wanted to put forward different writings, of the order of the savage to repent his words. I then chose as title "Outside Our" playing on the word outsider and these artists that we are looking for with a singularity in their writings. "Outside of us" to get out of what we already know, out of what we're used to experiencing. To discover an artist is to get out of your comfort zone, in a period when you build walls, when you reject different people. We must do exactly the opposite, to open up to other practices and take up this risky gamble. A number of the artists in this edition are evolving in a very personal aesthetic that requires us to reconsider our aesthetic judgements. Subsidiary remark : You are very present and active at the moment on the artistic scene, what explains this success, to the point of comparing you to Jean de Loisy who certainly inspires you ? A maturity can be and it is certain that we share great complicities with Jean de Loisy, digging furrows without consulting each other, themes close to each other with always this look that we have on what the one and the other does. I have a lot of admiration for him, he puts the artists at the heart of his project and we don't need to say any more about that. We try to make the lines move at our scale model, giving space to the artists. We have transformed here the Bernardins College, the Gare de Lyon for the Nuit Blanche, the Pont des Invalides... Art, even if it is still a rather secondary activity as seen in the media, confined to the leisure/life style pages, has so much to offer the world! This artistic scene is much wider than we imagine and that is what I have tried to translate in this Nuit Blanche with fashion, theatre and new magic, humanitarianism, fooding, ... it is much less padlocked and all this generation embodies a naturally ecological thought of art with this generosity brought to the world. And if Jean is obviously in the same state of mind, it is one of the reasons why, without doubt, my voice carries more at the moment. Operating Instructions #NightWhite : News points by the Yes We Camp collective The #WhiteNight map from @mapstr_app Choosing your trip: the map! Constellation of Ile Saint-Louis Constellation des Invalides Constellation de la Villette Golden Gate Constellation Satellites Greater Paris Map in PDF @NBParis @quefaireaparis @paris Follow the Nuit Blanche story on @paris_maville 5th edition of the Emerige Revelations Exchange http://revelations-emerige.com/ Follow Gaël Charbau's news http://www.gaelcharbau.com/ 08 Oct 2018 #Nuit Blanche 2018

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