INHABITING OTHER SHORES - Tramages Collective

Alexia Antuofermo is a visual artist and a researcher. She is interested in the relationship between the writing of the Earth and technologies. She experiments these articulations with digital tools and machines, working mainly with minerals. She observes their imprints and the reaction of the substance. With these techniques, she prints, engraves their traces and are incorporated in the stone, in the wood, in the cement, while the materials are transcribed by geometrical meshes and matrix textures. She is interested in technological imprints, and in circulations between the digital and terrestrial worlds by creating narratives and staging of artifacts. She also invents writings that are inscribed in the material, encrypted and decrypted. These transcriptions give form to anachronistic artifacts and poetic modellings that she calls geo-artefacts.

Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert is an artist, poet and researcher. Gellert works on collective inquiry into the poetics of relationship. They are interested in the plasticity of text and its inscription in matter - how our narratives shape us and our habitats.

Their work aims to go beyond the field of literature and arts to take root in a particular social context and act upon it. Their current artistic practice and research seeks to forge relationships between human beings and other forms of life through poetic address, through the creation of an interspecies language laboratory and a first case study with the white stilt, a migratory bird in the Mediterranean region where they now live.

Giacomo Sartori is an agricultural engineer and a writer. He is the author of several books and other publications on the soils and the landscape of the Alpine regions. In his more recent literary works, the themes of environmental problems are very present. In Italy he has published seven novels, including four collections of short stories and one collection of poems. The English translation of his penultimate novel (I am God, Restless Books, 2019), listed among the Financial Times Best Books of the Year, was awarded the Foreword Indie Gold Award for Literary Fiction (2019) and the Italian Prose in Translation Award (2020). His latest novel (Bug, Restless Books, 2021) is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award (2022). Three of his novels have been translated into French: : Insupportable (10/18 inédit), Anatomie de la bataille (Philippe Rey) and Sacrificio (Philippe Rey).

Laurine Wagner is a French contemporary artist and researcher who lives and works in Paris and Strasbourg. Between arts, sciences and society, Laurine Wagner creates poetic and immersive video and/or sound installations, photographs and performances. The act of experiencing is at the center of her reflections by questioning the states of "in-between". She investigates processes of transformation, environmental, social and mental issues, in order to reflect on the beliefs, feelings and experiences of each person.

The Other Shore, by Margalit Berriet

essay inspired by the works of the Tramages collective, written by Margalit Berriet

Available to read here in English and French.

Alexia Antuofermo, Chloé Devis,

Christopher Alexander Kostritsky Gellert,

Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith, Arasi Tiffany Tavares,

Elena Tognoli, Giacomo Sartori and Laurine Wagner

Chloé Devis Photographer and author, journalist by training, Chloé Devis questions the link, both intimate and collective, to places: those where we live, those from which we have originated from, those from which we cultivate memories, nostalgia or dreams. Her projects fluctuate between documentary and sensitive approach and combine different mediums and supports: from images to the words, from the archive to the found object... Her work, published and exhibited on several occasions in France, Belgium and Mauritania, is also nourished by her collaborations with other artists. She has also experimented with performance, installation and plastic creation. In 2021-22, she led a residency of creation-mediation in Haute-Loire in binomial with the plastic artist Alexia Antuofermo.

Taylor Smith is a visual artist currently based in Norway, working between Oslo and Paris. Interweaving bio art and in-situ, performative practices with photography, video, printmaking and sculpture, her practice seeks to exist in the fragile space — both material and conceptual — between decay and regeneration. Through collaborations with botanists, microbiologists and more, she attempts to decrypt scientific data through artistic rituals in-situ. The media and processes she employs question human relationships to the ephemeral, and our desire to preserve the natural world through synthetic methods.

Arasi Tiffany Tavares A university graduate from Paris 1 La Sorbonne, Arasi articulates her art around the spectators and their intimate relationship with the work. In a society where digital technology transforms our relationship with others and with objects, she plays with this mutation to transform, amuse, and shock an audience that is increasingly charmed by these new technologies.

From the performance to the interactive artwork, her compositions divert the perception of reality and push the limits of the imagination in order to create a contact between the public and the work.

Elena Tognoli visual artist, has numerous artistic interventions to her credit, both individual and collective, in several countries. She is the author of books in which she associates drawings and poetry (Mater Baltica, Editions Esperluète, 2022). After completing her philosophy studies in Milan, she obtained a BA in Illustration at Camberwell College of Art (University of the Arts, London) and a Master's degree in Fine Arts and Design in Education (Institute of Education, University College London). Her artistic practice is in constant dialogue with her educational research. Elena has collaborated with several institutions in developing artistic and participatory pathways, and in particular with: The British Library (London), Discover - Children's Story Centre (London), UNESCO (East Timor, 2010-2011), SESC (Brazil), Fondazione PInAC - Pinacoteca Internazionale dell'età evolutiva Aldo Cibaldi (Italy, 2016-2020).

Everywhere, our narratives, our imaginations, our dreams, give shape to the environments in which we live, to our own habitats.

This first exhibition of the collective Tramages within Mémoire de l'Avenir’s gallery space is an invitation to explore the urban, peri-urban and rural ecosystems of the earth, at different scales - from expressions of micro-bacterial topographies to the sounding voice of one of the last virgin forests in Europe - and within a variety of timeframes - human, geological, mythological, climatic, plant-based, etc.

Placed in dialogue, the works presented question more broadly the human imprint left both physically and immaterially on these worlds, be it on a local or global scale. Irremediably our words and actions alter the balance of life. How can our imaginations inhabit territories without exploiting them to the detriment of all the species living there?

How can we deal with these palimpsests, these physical and cultural sediments? How can we free ourselves from these heritages and disentangle ourselves from barren patterns, in order to re-strengthen our bonds with our human brothers and sisters as well as with the other forms of living?

These are the questions that run through the works in the exhibition, created individually or in pairs by the eight members of the collective. Resonating with each other through the scenography of the exhibition, the works open windows into worlds both nearby and distant, both present and future: each of them outlining a new way of rewriting our mental cartographies and opening them to other, more fertile horizons.

From the Haute-Loire and its legends to the arctic tundra through the humus of Picardy, from the lowlands facing rising waters to the overflowing of the Seine’s riverbed, Tramages issues an invitation for us to alter our visions, cross invisible borders and inhabit other shores.

During the three weeks of the exhibition and in conjunction with it, the artists of the collective will engage in a 20 hour cycle of workshops with a group of at-risk or impaired adults, in partnership with NGOs Autremonde and Mémoire de l'Avenir.

The Tramages Collective

https://tramages.com/

PRESENTING THE EXHIBITION

GROUP SHOW

NOVEMBRE 10TH -------- DECEMBER 3RD

VERNISSAGE NOVEMBER 9TH

TRAMAGES

INHABITING OTHER SHORES

TRAMAGES

exhibiting artists

VERNISSAGE

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 9th

7PM-9PM

PERFORMANCE

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 9th

7:45 PM

OPENING NIGHT

Thursday November 10th at 7:45 PM

FROM WITHIN THE WALL

performance by Kristoffer Stefan

Kristoffer Stefan is a sculptor, researcher, lecturer and experimental architect whose practice is seeking for new connections between art, culture, science and technology. While exceeding traditional conceptions of materiality, his artistic projects are mediating between human bodily movements, intrinsic characteristics of kinetic objects and changing perceptions of space.