"Urban Islands" in town for summer

Durant tout l'été, plusieurs artistes prendront possession de lieux emblématiques de la ville pour les transformer en espaces culturels insularisés. Le château, la tour Sain-Aubin, l'abbaye du Ronceray et le Jardin des Plantes ne seront plus des mon

uments, mais des oeuvres d'art... monumentales. 

If most of the time, cultural works may only be seen in museums, the 2014 summer in Angers is going to break with that principle. Five emblematic places of the city will host, during the exact summer season, June 21st-September 21st, the production of five artists. The title of that initiative, Urban Islands, unveils the aim of its sponsors : to set up in frequented places, the castle, the Saint-Aubin tower, the botanical garden and the Ronceray abbey-church, shapes and colors which will revisit those momuments and areas and to isolate them from the rest of the town as if they were in an island.

With the exhibition of Etienne Bossut, a sculptor settled in Rennes, the Angers castle is linked to contemporary housing thanks to items used for current constructions. The monument already enlivened by different medicinal gardens, will through the items of Etienne Bossut, strengthen its links with the surrounding town. The Saint-Aubin tower, another island in the city, will not be used as a simple repository for works of art but will be part of those because Nicolas Guiet, a painter from Paris, considers that the canvas is as important as the painting. So he will redesign the Saint-Aubin tower serious and monolithic architecture. A third Angers monument, the Ronceray abbey-church will receive Elsa Tomkiowak whose shapes and colors diffract the natural light caught by the building. Because of their presence, the sight on the place is completely different.

An open air space, the botanical garden, will dedicate two of its areas to the works of Katarina Kudelova and Pierre-Alexandre Remy. The first, a Maine-et-Loire artist, with "Party Lunch", will set up her works in the aviary of the garden. Mrs Kedelova often includes animals in her works because they constitute a (sad?) mirror of mankind. The aviaries are completly redesigned as artistic sceneries. In the middle of the pond within that garden, Pierre-Alexandre Remy deploys a colored structure which multiplies the reflections of the surroundings making of the water itself a new painting.

All these exhibitions separate the viewers from the urban space around, as if he stood in an island where culture is the unique crop.