Empreintes

As part of a partnership with the Charente-Maritime department and the Syndicat Mixte de Brouage, three artists from the young Essence Carbone artists' collective, in permanent residence at the Hôpital Marius Lacroix, have been selected to work on the history of Brouage, and more specifically on the white gold - salt - that enabled Brouage to develop and trade with Canada, which subsequently led to an exhibition at the Espace Champlain in Brouage. Jérôme Abel, Mathieu Duvignaud and Vincent Ruffin use multimedia, land art, paint and glass in their work. For this exhibition at Espace Champlain, the artists propose to take us through an experience inspired by the history of Brouage, leading us towards a current vision of our contemporary history: overexploitation of natural resources, migrations, population displacements, climate, xenophobia, globalization... List of authors : \- Estala López Solís: _El hilo la cadena (The thread is the chain)_ \- Estala López Solís and Patrick Beaulieu: Lost Pond \- Isabelle Hubert: _Empreintes_ (Impressions) \- Fares Chalabi: _Dialog des Kulturs_ \- Jean d'Amérique: Am I poor? \- Lolita Monga \- Monique Durand: _Brouage, avoir été_ (To have been) \- Sedjro Giovanni Houansou: _Brouage_ (Moorings) \- Azad Ziya Eren: _Souvenirs de mille ans pour Charles Baudelaire_ (Memories of a thousand years for Charles Baudelaire) \- Laure Gouraige: _Extrait exposition Espace Champlain_ (Excerpt from Espace Champlain exhibition) \- Cyril Juvenil Assomo: _Maculé_ (Maculé) \- Benjémy: _Daddy_ "Ruines" by Jerôme Abel is an installation inspired by the history of Brouage as a salt trading port. At the molecular level, salt has a cubic shape and sometimes forms pyramids. The idea here is to present a laboratory staging the contradictory phenomena of destruction and creation. Ruins are merely a stage in a process of transformation. Geometric volumes - cube, pyramid and cylinder - built from coarse salt are gradually destroyed in a slow drip process lasting months. From this destruction, new, more chaotic forms are born, under the effect of gravity and salt crystallization. Time and chaos are the architects. Like an inverted mirror, the fourth element of the installation is static. It's an empty frame where only the edges are drawn in shadow on a shapeless pile of salt, as if to make the salt's molecular structure perceptible.