La Fenice

«La Fenice » , a word that is engraved in the collective memory . Unfortunately not in mine. Fuck my parents of never have taken me to the opera. I went there three times since I'm in Venice: the first was a single visit, the second was an invitation my class received for Lodoïska di Cherubini and the last one was l'Elisir d'amore.

First, the place is majestic, the ceiling light which dominates the room look like a tree branch that has been invaded by a firefly swarm, the box seats are disposed on four floors and organized along the imperial box Napoleon used to cherish.

Elisir d'amore tells the story of Nemorino, a poor peasant in love of Adina. Ready to do everything that is possible to make her love him and push back the rich soldier who wants Adina as his wife,Nemorino hears about l'elisir d'amore and wants some. Here, a doctor or magician enters; he looks like he's some kind of cirucs performer with redhair raised above his head and a golden jacket (that I particularly like). His two assistants are dressed like the daughter Dita Von Teese and Paris Hilton could have together (Pink boa feathers + fishnet stockings). The magician proposed to the lover a bottle of elisir (called the Queen Iseult's love potion just like in the video I did 2 years ago) that is in fact, a bottle of red wine while precising to Nemorino that it will work in only 24hours. Nemorino drinks instantaneously the bottle and go to Adina. Upset by Nemorino enthusiasm she accepts the soldier's proposal.

« Adina, credimi, te ne scongiuro »

Nemorino, in his deepest grief goes back to the magician to get some more elisir but he has no money left. He decides to become a soldier of Adina's futur husband for 20 «scudi»

The girls of the Village learn in the same time the death of Nemorino's wealthy uncle that makes him turn into a good match that all the girls want to marry. Adina hears about the Elisir and attributes Nemorino's love for her to it. Desappointed of not being able to be loved for what she is she lets escape a single tear that Nemorino's perceived and realized that she loves him back.

She admits him her love «Prendi, per me sei libero» and the magician meets the success with the sale of Elisir d'amore bottles.

Aliénor.

Work -

I put some of my works on Saatchi and Youtube

These are just old works as I haven't completed any project since- tears-

Saatchi Online Collections

Youtube

Twitter

And 2 of the blogs I run when I was younger:

Fotolog

Firefly

(where I displayed my jewellery collection)

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is danish but lived most of his life in Iceland (#3 on my to-do-list section trip). Since my first encounter with his work in 2003 I've been fascinated by his world. How he balanced the natural world through the filter of new technologies and how he manages to deep us into science fiction dimensions. He makes our five senses play with the natural elements and use them as real ingredients. Smoke, light, wind and other intangible elements are used as material features of his sculptures and installations.

Lava floor - 2002

In 2002, The Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris featured an exhibtion entitled "Chaque matin je me sens différent. Chaque soir je me sens le même" (Each morning I feel different. Each evening I feel the same) Eliasson's work inside the exhibition was an installation on the floor of lavaro rock. Visitors were invited to walk across the uneven surface to reach the galleries as it was disposed on the lobby.” Bringing nature in museums and physically engage visitors are key points in his work,

The weather project - 2003

It was my first visit at the Tate modern in London. I arrived in a big hall where a mirror was disposed on the ceiling. My first impression was that I was in Totall Recall(the movie)on Mars waiting for Doug Quaid to free oxygene in the galleries. Maybe because I've always been considered as an alien, I've really enjoyed walking around this installation like I was in my element. The haze created by a fair smoke (Smoke = a poetic ingredient see there)gives an kind of irreality or superreality ( I use these concepts thanks to a text I red in my actual course The Experience Economy: the experience of the experience). I remembered I make my (reluctant) dad lying on the floor ,like number of visitors, and forced him to take the time to travel between the slices of sun the mirror was displaying all around. Walking into space (so usual for me I do it every night), in weightlessness in another dimension.

Sonne statt Regen - 2003

In this piece, Eliasson chose to display spectrum colors along a curved room where visitors could walk along. I've never seen this work but I like the fact that he did a reference in the title to Joseph Beus performance lyrics.

Music Wall - 2006

Beauty - 1993

Beauty was presented first in 1993, and consisted in garden hoses punctured by holes from where water run off. Theses garden hoses are enlighted with flashing rhythmical lights

He reproduced this work for La Biennale di architectura this year and I had the chance to know it. It is totally amazing. You are deepen into a big dark and silent room where people are struggling to take a picture of the work. The hoses seem like weird snakes possessed by some king of spirit. The water that run off divide itself into mountain of diamonds disappearing almost instantly in the darkness of the hall.

Your split second house - 2010

Dicks at the museum

Punta Della Dogana - 0 - 1 - Peggy Guggenheim

La vita a Venezia

Ouch. I've just seen my last post and yes I definitely look like a posh bitch.

Judging of my non existing following post about my pretending innocent side of life, huge changes were expecting.

Dirty laundry bag behind, I've moved to Venice La Sérénissime or City of waters, I've swop my underground tube against the vaporetto and my rue Mouffetard appartement for a beautiful palace above charming canals.

On mornings, opera' singers woke me up peacefully as they entertain chinese tourists gondola' stroll and disapperared in the haziness behind punto dei Tolentini.

My lectures at the Ca'Foscari university occupying 90% of my time, I spend my free hours between the - oh god - palaces (where I've already pictured myself a hundred times in ten years with a diamond tiara, a long black dress and high red gloves) of the Gran Canal, the many art exhibitions and other cultural events of the city.

Let's have a look:

Palazzo Grassi - Punta Della Dogana website

These two magical places (the first is an 18th century jewel and the other an industrial heritage storehouse at the crossroad between the Giudeca's canal and the Gran canal) present the François Pinault collection.

As I drive a group study on it I had the chance to meet yesterday all the staff and do a much more detailed visit.

Two years ago I visited Sequence 1 exhibition and it was already amazing. The creme of contemporary art from one room to another, Urs Fischer monumental installation on the centre , Anselm Reyle's fluorescent monochrome and Mike Kelley installation.

The foundation has now taken its legitimacy in the Venitian landscape and won the concession of Punta Della Dogana last year. Mapping the studio is the binary exhibition that the two institutions are sharing, it is supposed to feature the work-in-progress of the world's famous contemporary artists...bla-bla-bla.Most expensive and less risky works of art that's it.Even if there is no link between pieces, the collection is as rich as its owner.You can dance on Nazy's on Piotr Uklański piece and pass through the red blood cell pearls of Felix Gonzales Torres. As you immerse yourself into the superflat painting technique of Takashi Murakami, two steps after you enter into the night life of Bruce Nauman studio. On the first floor of the Punta Della Dogana the Fucking Hell installation of the Chapman brothers bring you back to your childhood with 30 000 nazis plastic soldiers and a Charly to find between them (look for him, he is at the top of a hill painting a naive landscape while facing the horror of the war). Oh and yes I forgot, if you look with caution there is a dinosaur gaving birth to siamese brothers...does that make sens?

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Since I red her biography 5 years ago I have always been fascinated by PG. She was a visionary in her time, she kept falling in love with complicated artists, she got the palace life and the wardrobe I dream every night of and overall the funky sunglasses EVER. After one week in Venice, I run to buy them...ok people look at me like I am some kind of stranger here (Venice is a small small town) but I cannot tell that I am not used to or that I don't like it

Wearing this glasses while I was visiting the collection made me meet the director who thanks me for promoting PG around

A Brancusi bird sculpture, a Duchamp studiocase and a Renée Magritte Empire of light were my top three works. I've never been a big fan of Magritte and I've seen copies of Empire of light a thousand times in books, art history lectures but the real canvas is beyond comparison. The artifical and natural lights struggling in such a poetic way that you never know where Magritte let you: in the darkness of the first plan or in the cloudscapes of the second

Biennale of Architectura

I don't know anything about architecture and if there is one place in the world to appreciate it it should be the Biennale. No hindsights on it I can only tell that contemporary artists should learn from architects how to manage spaces.

Top three:

cloudscape made by german climate engineering firm and japanese firm tetsuo kondo architects explores the poetic nature of artificial cloud

Dancing waters as I nicknamed the work (I can't remember who did it) are a series of hoses dancing with the water pression in the dark. With a beam of light the waterdrop turn into diamonds and the magic occured

The Forty- Part Motet is an immersive sculpturally-conceived sound piece made by Janet Cardiff. She used 40 separately recorded voices played back through 40 speakers. Using recordings of the Salisbury Cathedral choir singing Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1573) by Thomas Tallis, one of England's most influential Renaissance composers.

It is probably the room where I stayed the longer in the Biennale, I've closed my eyes in the centre of the speakers and let the sound create an architecture around me.

Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti - Stanley Kubrick Photography

Long before he became the filmmaker we all know, Kubrick was a photographer. Starting as the teenarger the exhbition traces how he captured the mood of his times. The exhibtions shows 200 pictures (and is really small) but no fault. Every series underline how Kubrick was meticulous and how he framed his visions.

Two series were stunning: the first was on a 12 years old shoe-shine boy in NY and the other one on the dark side of the circus industry

The Biennale du Kitsch

The first sense of the Kitsch word is representation. Thus the exhibition organizes along the real nature of the concept 30 figurative artists.

Odd Nerdrum and Helene Knoop entered in my A-list of favourite figurative painters directly!

Many other exhibitions done, I have also attend two operas at la Fenice and one classical concert, being to Murano, San Michele cimetry, visited Scuolas and churches... but I am tired to write it down

With the gap between my last post and this one, the suspens lies in what will be the next one.

Maybe I will be the first astronaut riding the Mars Dunes or just an alcoholic surviving in a flat her brother and sister are sub-leasing for her.

Aliénor.

Images of summer 2010

July 2010: a cocktail of trips with friends

Let's have a look!

+ Flower power party

For this event I borrowed my mother dress (my favourite shop!), a lagon blue Tara Jarmon two-pieces dress. I remember spending hours looking at it without the courage to try it on; with my aspirin-tablet-skin-color I must avoid these fantasies but with one week of complete cooking in the South of France it was perfect!

+ Ibiza for 24 hours (again)

There is something special about Ibiza, as soon as you touch the ground (After one hour of total fear as I am a plane-phobic and an even more jet-plane-phobic combined with a strong claustrophobia) you entered in another dimension. Somewhere between the hippie era and the seventies. People are relaxed, often drunk and social links interweave as spiderwebs as you toast your glass with a total stranger. We went to La Leche party at the Amnesia Club, slept at the Ocean drive hotel (just to remind I am David Lynch first fan) and spent the day at the Blue Marlin Beach before taking our plane where I had the nicest discussion ever with a german pilot who explained me eveything I need to know about 'these strange noises in the rear-end'

+ St Tropez

As I was writing my thesis during the summer, I avoided St Tropez from the to-do list but at the last minute I changed my mind and packed my stuff. This changing mind was helped by a text message from my german ex-boyfriend who was at St Tropez for the weekend. The weekend was great, Caves du Rois on saturday night and Nikki Beach the next day where I, as I did last year, customized the Nikki Beach shirts for my friends. My german thing was totally disappointing. It is strange how you can transform a standard tasteless guy into a zouper (as german likes to say) man-to-have with only memories. Eurk!

Oh God!! I really look like a superficial slut, I will try to be a better girl in my next article helped with family weekends, and working hours that constituted the august days I have been through...

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Yesterday night I had to leave early my class of Sex, Violence and politics- while very interesting-  to run to the theater to see the most famous piece of Samuel Beckett : Waiting for Godot. Considered as the most prominent work in the Theatre of the Absurd movement I never had the chance to see a representation. And I quickly realized how lucky I was - once again- to see it in London with amazing actors such as Ian Mc Kellen. Oh god!! that's how you distinguish a good performer everytime he plays a role in the Lord of Rings, in X-men or Estragon in Beckett's he is his character, his spectrum of representations is so large that he is never assigned to one kind of character. 

 

Synopsis: Waiting for Godot is a two acts piece and tells the history of Estragon and Vladimir waiting for someone named Godot. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide.Their waiting is interrupted by the passing through of Pozzo and his heavily-laden slave Lucky. At the end of the act , a boy arrives, purporting to be a messenger sent from Godot, to advise the pair that he will not be coming that evening but surely tomorrow. During Vladimir's interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came the day before, making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for an indefinite period and will likely continue to wait ad infinitum. After the boy departs, they decide to leave but make no attempt to do so, an action repeated in Act II.

Throughout Waiting for Godot, Beckett introduces religious, philosophical, classical and biographical references. The play is a mix of comedy and pathos which I found the most interesting feature of the piece. People in the audience had strange attitudes especially when came the time to laugh, sometimes they just laugh when I woud never think about it. While watching the piece you are torn between laughable scenes and dramatic ones. For example when Estragon and Vladimir think about suicide at the end of Act II by hanging themeselves on the tree (only piece of the deco) but have no rope, Estragon undoes his belt and looses his pants. The only people I sw laughing felt quickly guilty to do so. I had this impression that everyone was waiting for a signal to express their emotions.

Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until the 4th avril.

Aliénor.