Les Extatiques 2022

For this 5th edition of the Extatiques, nine artists take over the esplanade of La Défense, from the Takis basin to the Agam Fountain, to make you perceive the living that surrounds us.

Free exhibition in the public space (Esplanade de La Défense), open every day.

The artists of the program

1. JAN KOPP – Les Chercheuses de l’air
2. MARCUS COATES – Nature Calendar
3. MIREILLE FULPIUS – Porte à Faux II
4. ELSA TOMKOWIAK - OUT/Codalema (les rayons)
5. UGO SCHIAVI - Soulèvement-Effondrement
6. FRANCK GERARD - Drôles de solitudes
7. ABRAHAM POINCHEVAL - Le chevalier errant, l’homme sans ici
8. COLOCO - Jardin faisant
9. GLORIA FRIEDMANN - Les Ancêtres du Futur

1. JAN KOPP – Les Chercheuses de l’air, 2022

JAN KOPP

Born in 1970. Lives and works in Lyon.

Jan Kopp is a polymorphic artist. His work unfolds as well through vast installations as in more discrete forms such as pencil on paper. His works are often realized in situ, implying a particular attention to the situation, and opening towards a use and a transformation of what is present. The city is a recurring theme, as much as a possible place of intervention as of observation to detect and figure the most minute poetic signs.

The work for Paris La Défense

The artist invests the Takis basin with an installation specifically designed for this space. The basin is transformed, for the duration of the edition, into a living organism which, according to a random score, wakes up, hums and breathes. Bubbles and bubbles of varying sizes form on the surface of the water, like ephemeral islands governed by an invisible air system. They taunt the walkers with their uncontrollable presence that seems to come straight out of a fantastic universe.

Les chercheuses de l’air, 2022
Système d’air comprimé

2. MARCUS COATES – Nature Calendar, 2022

MARCUS COATES

Born in 1968. Lives and works in London.

Much of Marcus Coates' work focuses on natural environments and their manifestations in our imagination. For him, the way we experience the natural world is fundamental to our attitudes and decision-making towards all life forms. His work seeks to test the perceptions that shape our cultural perspectives, at the expense of other species. The artist has a history of collaborating with people from a wide range of disciplines including anthropologists, ornithologists, wildlife sound recordists, choreographers, politicians, psychiatrists, palliative care consultants, musicians, and primatologists.

The work for Paris La Défense

The British artist reactivates an iconic piece entitled "Nature Calendar". This "nature calendar" compiles, thanks to the collaboration of researchers, amateur naturalists and citizen projects, the biodiversity news that occurs in Paris and its surroundings during the three months of the edition. In a will to divert the principle of the news and the existing urban furniture, the artist diffuses these news on the advertising and informative screens as real information in real time, thus transforming the local natural events into real news essential to the understanding of our world.

Nature Calendar, 2022
Textes diffusés sur mobiliers urbains digitaux

3. MIREILLE FULPIUS – Porte à Faux II, 2022

MIREILLE FULPIUS

Born in 1974 in Offenburg, Germany. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.

French-Swiss visual artist, Mireille Fulpius learns early to consider nature. Perhaps it is in this insatiable curiosity about life that we find the starting point of what will become her essential activity: sculpture. A free explorer, she alternates materials - metal, wood and paper - as well as techniques, occupying the space inside and outside through the creation of sculptures, installations and prints. Towards the end of the 1990s, Mireille Fulpius began collaborating with Sylvie Bourcy in the creation of landscape works thought out on the scale of sites.

The work for Paris La Défense

Mireille Fulpius, in collaboration with Sylvie Bourcy, reproduced the Porte à Faux installation in the particular context of the esplanade of La Défense. Playing with the perspective of the space, this installation creates a crossing, like a new breakthrough, inside the emblematic axis of La Défense, offering an off-axis and new viewpoint on the surrounding space.

Porte à faux II, 2022
Bois et fer

4. ELSA TOMKOWIAK – OUT/Codalema (les rayons), 2022

ELSA TOMKOWIAK

Born in 1981. Lives and works in Douarnenez.

Elsa Tomkowiak's works are offered as devices to experiment with, volumes to cross. Blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the artist deploys her colored ranges in space. His installations stage clever collisions of frank and saturated colors. The energy of her gestures and the tools that extend them (brushes, brooms...) is all the more perceptible as it is often revealed by transparent materials that let the light pass through them.

The work for Paris La Défense

Elsa Tomkowiak invests all the steps of the esplanade of La Défense by deploying the light spectrum in the landscape. The colors accompany the spectator in his wandering and invite to a magical and changing chromatic experience.

OUT/ Codamela (les rayons), 2022
Vinyle, peinture

5. UGO SCHIAVI - Soulèvement-Effondrement, 2022

UGO SCHIAVI

Born in 1987. Lives and works in Marseille.

Ugo Schiavi's sculptures are presented as fragments of bodies eroded by time, destined for an archaeology of the future. While remaining faithful to his practice of taking and capturing the outside world, the artist produces telescopes of temporality and civilization, going from ancient culture to that of industrial overproduction. He conceives hybrid beings: a sort of composite chimera made of heterogeneous objects and materials, as if springing from the unconscious of our post-industrial societies.

The work for Paris La Défense

Ugo Schiavi updates his monumental project, produced during the 2018 Nuit Blanche. The work Uprising-Collapse is a casting of the genius of the Republic, taken from the sculpted group The Triumph of the Republic by Jules Dalou located on the Place de la Nation, to which other contemporary sculptural elements are added in a form of sought-after anachronism. These overturned sculptural fragments spread over the Place Moretti of the esplanade of La Défense in the manner of a contemporary ruin invaded by vegetation.

Soulèvement-Effondrement, 2018-2022
Résine, terre, végétaux, structure acier

6. FRANCK GERARD - Drôles de solitudes, 2022

FRANCK GERARD

Born in 1972. Lives and works in Nantes.

Through a methodical and hazardous observation of reality, Franck Gérard captures situations, without any preconceived ideas or preconditions, offering only "what he sees". More of an observer than an interventionist, the photographer's eye draws up, territory after territory, a veritable lexicon in which the slightest gesture, the slightest situation, whether banal or extraordinary, are listed as so many states constituting our daily life.

The work for Paris La Défense

During a month-long creative residency, the artist invested the space of La Défense in order to capture and restore the very particular energy of this district. Drôles de solitudes, 2022 is a series of thirty photographs taken during this residency and presented on urban furniture in two places along the route.

Drôles de solitudes, 2022
Impressions numériques sur papier dos blanc

7. ABRAHAM POINCHEVAL - Le chevalier errant, l’homme sans ici, 2022

ABRAHAM POINCHEVAL

Born in 1972. Lives and works in Marseille.

Abraham Poincheval is an insatiable explorer. Whether it is crossing the Alps by pushing a capsule that serves as a shelter or locking himself up for a week in a rock, his expeditions require a total commitment of the body. The sculptures that the artist conceives are the envelope that welcomes the performer, the object that disrupts the landscape and exists through the stories of witnesses.

The work for Paris La Défense

A knight's armor that comes out of nowhere, evoking an old performance by the artist, undertakes a static journey in the middle of the esplanade of La Défense. A metallic nature invades the sculpture, like the beginning of a metamorphosis. Anachronistic and out of place warrior figure, it becomes the very allegory of La Défense du Vivant.

Le chevalier errant, l’homme sans ici, 2022
Acier inoxydable et aluminium

8. COLOCO - Jardin faisant, 2022

LE COLLECTIF COLOCO

Coloco is a multidisciplinary creative workshop around the landscape and the city, focused on the living. It brings together landscape architects, urban planners, botanists, gardeners and artists in a "contemporary landscape" workshop. Coloco creates gardens and pilots land-use projects for public and private actors, on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, in rural and urban areas, in France and around the world.

The work for Paris La Défense

The Coloco collective proposes to make an ephemeral garden emerge from the ground of the La Défense esplanade, entitled Jardin faisant, a veritable plant explosion by lifting to allow the observation of vegetation ranging from wild to horticultural. By bringing together wild, edible and ornamental plants, the landscape artists remind us that we are dependent on the living. Here the garden is on a stopover as it will then travel to its final landing: this profusion of vegetation will be installed in the Nanterre Cloud Towers at the end of Les Extatiques to compose a garden closely thought out with its inhabitants.

Jardin Faisant, 2022
Botanique et jardinage

9. GLORIA FRIEDMANN - Les Ancêtres du Futur

GLORIA FRIEDMANN

Born in 1950. Lives and works in Aignay-le-Duc.

Self-taught and committed artist, environmental activist, mainly sculptor, Gloria Friedmann deploys an experimental energy in practices as different as painting, installation, photography, performance or video. She delicately questions the world and life by evoking ecological issues, such as the disappearance of our ecosystem and the fragility of life. She stages the relationship between men and their time and, more generally, the human species and its natural universe.

The work for Paris La Défense

Produced for Les Extatiques 2022, the sculpture Les Ancêtres du Futur presents a human figure supported and crowned by the animal kingdom. This work, which re-enacts the allegorical codes of classical statuary, is an ode to La Défense du Vivant, presented as an echo of Louis-Ernest Barrias' eponymous sculpture, La Défense de Paris, which is nearby.

Les Ancêtres du Futur, 2022
Résine, terre, acier, peinture, vernis