Klavdij Sluban & Laurent Tixador
ARTS RESIDENCY IN KERGUELEN
Les Rencontres Arles Photographie
02.07.2012 - 23.09.2012
Klavdij Sluban, photographer, and Laurent Tixador, visual artist, are the first recipients of the Atelier des Ailleurs residency. The Atelier des Ailleurs is an arts residency in the exceptional context of the Kerguelen Islands. It aims to offer two artists conditions beneficial to creativity and experimentation in a place without a permanent population and almost exclusively taken over by the scientific community. The two artists stayed for three months at Port-aux-Français, mingling in with the daily life of the scientific teams, to the rhythm of expeditions and rotations. The works presented at the Rencontres d’Arles are the result of work realised during this residency. The gaze they bring is not illustrative or descriptive, but fits within a logic that favours the relocation of artistic practice. Open to individual artists, the call for applications launched internationally received 440 artists’ projects. A jury composed of four state representatives (the minister in charge of Overseas Territories, TAFF, the minister of Culture and Communication, DAC-OI) and four personalities from the world of the arts (Erika Hoffmann, Caroline Smulders, Isabelle Gaudefroy and Antoine de Galbert), got together last October in Paris to select the two winning artists. Located in the Southern Hemisphere, fifteen days by sea from the Réunion Island, the islands of the Kerguelen Archipelago, once named the ‘Devastation Islands’, do not have a permanent population, but host, depending on the bases, from thirty to one hundred scientific and technical personnel, who stay there from six months to a year.
For this residency, Klavdij Sluban presents a project dealing with photography and its different formats, in black and white. It highlights the very themes he deals with: travels and claustration.
Laurent Tixador has chosen to help scientists. Erasing his own work to emphasize the ones of the scientific community working on the islands, he shows his desire to comprehend nature’s diversity, to live different and unique experiences, confronting himself with specific points of view on landscapes.