La Grande Évasion
Conception: Pierre Leguillon

Photographic and sound installation

Pierre Leguillon got interested in the image’s channels of circulation: the states they go through, the traces of senses that they transmit. What movement takes place inside the passing from a series of heterogeneous snapshots to a collection? In the sliding from one medium to another, from a virtual space to a physical one? With La Grande évasion, a collection assembled on the internet tries to get to its audience on the occasion of its movements – waiting for stories, for choreograpies that every one will be able to make them perform.

Following a proposition by Musée de la danse, Pierre Leguillon set out on a quest of photographs forming a network of associations around dance, in order to build a collection.
Images of dance, or of images dancing? Tackling movement by the margins – through a detail, an echo, a gesture, a hint – it is, above all, signs that circulate, bearing together some historic, thematic, or purely subjective links. In order to bring those orphan snapshots, picked up on the internet, to the audience, Pierre Leguillon has devised a plan for escape in several stages: from the purchase to the sorting out, from the classifying to the putting online on FlickR, passing by their public billposting – up to their material presence in the exhibition space, in the manner of a mini-museum on dance in a box.
From those scattered photographs, every one will be able to recompose his own story, reconstruct his choreography following the putting together, the associations – like through a flip-book. This carefully planned “escape” takes place in, between, outside the images, in a constant backward and forward motion which reveals their multiple character: traces of a past, index of an absent source, and premises of the new stories still to be written by them within the collections of the Dancing Museum.

La Grande Évasion on Flickr

Materials: Photographs and aluminum boxes with sound and lights. 60 1/4 x 122 x 27 1/2 inches (153 x 310 x 70 cm)
Sound material: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

Production: Musée de la danse / Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne – Direction: Boris Charmatz. Association supported by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication (Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles / Bretagne), the city of Rennes, the regional Council of Brittany and the General Council of Ille-et-Vilaine.
The Institut français contributes regularly to the international touring of the Musée de la danse.
Thanks to: Tim Mullen - www.pinazangaro.com

Created in 2012 at Musée de la danse, Rennes, France.

Cover picture: © Pierre Leguillon

Share: