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Michel Aubry, Vercors Regional Nature Park

The 72 593th Part of the world

Commissioned within the framework of the inter-parks cooperation project Paysage Industriel (Industrial Landscape): Monts d’Ardèche, Lorraine, Pilat, Vercors

The 72 593th Part of the world

Traditional crafts hold an important place in Royans-Vercors’ history. The production of wooden tableware especially, boomed during the second half of the XXth century, with some fifty companies employing more than six hundred workers. Today only four workshops are in operation. The work requested here must draw on the threads of the past to think of the future and account for the territory’s plural realities.

Straight away, Michel Aubry chooses to decompartmentalize his subject and associate the Vercors project with the one taking place in parallel at the Pilat park. His research is based on three works that evoke the industrial landscape and the relationship with natural resources: Paysage avec travaux de la mine (1544) (Landscape with mine work) by Herri met de Bles, Le Feu (1606) (The Fire) by Jan Breughel the Elder and La Sixième Partie du monde (1927) (A 6th Part of the World) by filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

Michel Aubry’s proposal for the Vercors park is inspired by a sequence from La Sixième Partie du monde showing a Siberian shaman who dances “in a costume laden with symbolic objects, both protection and a conductive jacket linked to natural elements.” He rethinks the shaman’s costume and associates it with the sound tubes designed in the turnery tradition. “Like the shaman, sound connects elements coming from the forest to material objects.”

On the 27th September 2014, Marianne Baillot initiated the work with a choreographic performance.

Today The 72 593th Part of the World is part of the Conservation of the Drôme Department collection and is on permanent display in the municipal council room of Saint-Jean-en-Royans. Other variations of the dance are scheduled for the Vercors region.

Press release, September 2014- pdf


Patrons: Members of the Arbre and Engivane associations and the Vercors Regional Nature Park

Funding: Fondation de France/ New Patrons programme, Vercors Regional Nature Park, European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development: LEADER, Department of Drôme, the town of Saint-Jean-en-Royans

 2014

crédits photographiques Phoebé Meyer

Michel Aubry, Pilat Regional Nature Park

La 213 429th Part of the World

The 213 429th Part of the World is Michel Aubry’s response to a commission given by the Iguerande association and the Pilat Regional Nature Park. It covers an area that retains few architectural traces of its metallurgy activity. All that remains is the notion of a dirty job in contact with black dust. There is a real working culture, however, in the manufacture of the finished object, as well as small companies whose specialization stems from ancient skills in the foundry and precision mechanics and locksmithing industries. How then to restore the place of an industry on the scale of a landscape whose resources have contributed to its development?

Michel Aubry’s proposal echoes the changes in Pilat’s sound environment with the installation of numerous forges, stones used for nailsmithing and subcontracting workshops for the valley’s main industry. Michel Aubry questions this sound footprint by making sound recordings inside the companies. These recordings lead to editioned vinyl records and the manufacture, by the Trouillet company in Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette, of a metal case intended to accommodate an instrument that integrates a pair of turntables and a mixer. It allows you to create compositions from engraved sounds and premixes from the samples.

The records are published in seven examples and assembled in two boxes. The work was performed during a concert performance by hip-hop scratcher Matthieu Crimersmois and dj artists on the 4th July 2014 in the Sainte-Julie factory at Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette.

press release, July 2014 – pdf

Patrons: Éric Perrin, historian and member of the Iguerande association, the Pilat Regional Nature Park
Funding : Fondation de France/ New Patrons programme, Vercors Regional Nature Park, European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development: LEADER 2014

2014

 Photographic credits: Marc Domage (2,3) and Emmanuelle Boccou