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In June 2024, Alliance Française de Banjul is honored to welcome plant-based visual artist Emmanuelle Briat. Specializing in Land Art, Emmanuelle will take over the Alliance’s premises and garden to create a series of fascinating works. These ephemeral floral sculptures blend seamlessly into the setting, revealing its subtleties.
During her residency, Emmanuelle will showcase her talents in a various ways:
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About the artist :
A plant-based visual artist, Emmanuelle Briat’s artistic practice is based on the use of natural materials. Working with living things, she creates organic forms based on plant and mineral architecture. She weaves, composes, interweaves and shapes the elements she gathers from nature to reveal their particularities, textures and developmental capacities. She lets herself be guided by the observation of nature to compose poetic works that are both timeless and ephemeral.
Her works are set in space and take their place in urban and natural landscapes. The artist also creates plant-based scenographies, working with video and sound. By creating with plants, she seeks to restore man’s link with nature. Her plant sculptures blend into spaces, sometimes integrating themselves into trees to invite walkers to stop and take a look at the environment.
It’s a new approach to nature and a chance to understand our environment in a new way.
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BOTANICAL EXPLORATIONS
In curves and volumes
This exhibition is structured around several volumes and sculptures in the park of the Alliance Française, combined with a plant scenography in the gallery.
The idea is to explore plants through links, lianas and movement, to invite us to take a closer look at botanical curiosities, to underline the link that unites us with living things.
The exhibition is made up of various plants and materials collected in the Parc de l’Alliance, in the bush and on the beach (bamboos, lianas, shells, marine ropes, roots, various plants, etc.). The flexibility and ability of these plants to form curves guided my project.
The hymenocallis, Spider lily, is one of my favorite flowers, with its white petals and delicious fragrance. It is present in the park and to find it again after all its years in Europe was a great pleasure.
Several of my latest pieces are inspired by spiders.
A stroll along the beach at Leybato led me to discover a multitude of shells in magnificent shades of red and orange. I also collected fragments of marine rope from local fishing and trawling boats. Ropes that break, links that separate. Ropes used to fish, to feed families, huge ropes from trawlers that plunder the ocean to the detriment of local populations. Looking at the ropes, we can imagine the imbalance, the unfair competition between the factories of the sea and the local fishermen, who sometimes no longer have enough fish for themselves, who sometimes give up fishing to try and escape to Europe with their pirogues. Ties that are breaking.
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