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The Memories of Royan

2023

Image de l'œuvre
Image © SLIDERS_lab

This summer exhibition concludes a year-long creative residency in Royan. The SLIDERS_Lab uses new technologies to take visitors on a journey through the memories of the town of Royan, through a series of audiovisual productions based on a corpus of archives from various collections, postcards and family memories. This partly fictional, partly documentary approach aims to create original views of the seaside resort and its inhabitants, both permanent and seasonal. The periods chosen are those of the upheavals that the town has undergone and that it has inscribed in its own representations, as a result of its total traumatic destruction and its reconstruction at the end of the Second World War.

Exhibition The Memories of Royan, Capture's art centre, Royan (Charente-maritime), 7 July to 3 September 2023.

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Nine new installations have been created for this exhibition, which combines the history of Royan with a journey through the history of media: photography and printing with postcards, the panorama with a 360° film exploring the notion of immersion, early cinema with holiday films mounted on circular film, animation, video games with interactive images and virtual worlds to explore, and artificial intelligence with generations of automatic texts:


Series of postcards of Royan, 2023

Placed at the entrance to the exhibition, the installation of two series of postcards from the collections of the Musée de Royan is an introduction to the journeys to come. The story begins at the beginning of the 20th century, in black and white, and ends in the 1960s, in pain and colour, after the reconstruction of part of the city destroyed during the Second World War.


Punctum Proximum, 2023

A strange 26-minute rush! In optics, the punctum proximum is the nearest point that can be clearly observed. In photographic theory, the punctum is the point from which the gaze constructs the image (R. Barthes). Each moment in the film begins by focusing the viewer's gaze on a detail chosen from a postcard, a point that is initially indiscernible because we are too close to the scene to see it. As the camera zooms out, the mystery of the image gradually disappears, revealing its contours, shapes, objects, landscapes and the men and women who make it up.


Topomovie_Royan, 2023

In early cinema, repetition and circularity were at the heart of the attraction, building a new cultural series of moving images (N. Dulac, A. Gaudreault). Topomovie_Royan questions this history by presenting a loop of images that rotate in space, like their famous predecessors mounted on phenakisticopes, zootropes, praxinoscopes, etc. At regular intervals, a film sequence is played, chosen at random from the 64 that make up the cylinder. It is placed in front of the spectator, who can then interact with it: slow it down, fix it, release its movement.


Acknowledgements Cinémathèque de la Nouvelle-Aquitaine


The Wave, 2023

The viewer is placed inside a sandcastle, facing the waves. Will this meagre barrier erected against the tide live up to its promise? That, of course, is the thrill of this 360° film. The only clue we can give you is that it's truly immersive!


The Sea, 2023

Postcards of waves fade in and out on the screen.


Cities of Sand series: Royan, 2023

• Animation: Vincent Villalta

Everyone dreams by the sea, and their dreams are the colour of sand. Imaginary cities appear and disappear in the blink of an eye, buildings rise and fall like victims of the acceleration of time. In the animated film, everyone will recognise the modernist architecture that is emblematic of post-war Royan: the post office, Place Botton, Saint-Jean church, the water tower, the city casino, destroyed in 1985, and the seafront.


Time Travel, 2023

• Animation: Loïc Almeida

• Photomontage: Laurenn Lecroc

In January and April 1945, Royan was bombed twice, once by the Royal Air Force and once by the US Air Force, reducing the town to rubble. The virtual reality installation “Time Travel” takes visitors on a tour of the destroyed Royan, moving back and forth between yesterday and today. The destroyed city is reconstructed using elements cut from archival documents.


Devastation of War,, 2023

• SLIDERS_lab & Dora Stanzel

Aerial photographs of Royan, destroyed in 1945, are digitally manipulated to recreate volumes and reliefs. The result of this patient and meticulous work will be porcelain plates to be placed on illuminated tables. These sculptures depict contrasting pairs of words: strong and fragile, flawless and dark, shadow and light, for example.


Best Wishes from Royan, 2023

• AI development: Anne-Gwenn Bosser, École Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Brest, Lab-STICC CNRS UMR 6285, COMMEDIA team; Josselin Scouarnec, Université de Bretagne Ouest.

• Text transcription: Laurenn Lecroc

The end of the exhibition also marks the end of the images. This is a sound piece, with voices that mix, overlap and blend. You have to pay close attention and listen to the endless stories being woven. What exactly do we hear? Postcard texts read aloud. It's beautiful and disturbing at the same time, something that questions and unsettles the viewer. Could it be that the voices are a little too mechanical, that the stories sometimes have neither head nor tail, that the list of micro-narratives goes on and on? But who is there? Who is speaking? And where is he speaking from?


Thanks to Cereproc Software

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Exhibition The Memories of Royan, Capture's art centre, Royan (Charente-maritime), 7 July to 3 September 2023.