Actions Urbaines

During the Summer of 1996, ten artists will present installations and performances to take place in the cities of Metz and Luxembourg. Within the framework of this project - a cooperation between the Casino Luxembourg and the Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Lorraine in collaboration with the cities of Metz and Luxembourg - Filippo Falaguasta, Robert Milin and Antoine Prum have been invited to realize their works in Luxembourg, while Biefer & Zgraggen, Thomas Hirschhorn, Marcus Kreiss, Tania Mouraud, Lucy Orta, Cécile Paris and Angel Vergara have been invited to work in Metz. All of them will present actions that are meant to directly involve the city-dwellers.

In public places (railway station, museum, bars), Biefer & Zgraggen will present their new video on the Tele-Art School in which the two artists themselves explain 20th-century art history in their very own way; Filippo Falaguasta offers his services in twenty-four different jobs (cook, barkeeper, painter, ...) he carries out for any Luxembourger who wishes to hire him; in a makeshift shed, not far away from the Turkish cultural centre in Metz, Thomas Hirschhorn presents an installation with a series of drawings and collages made of scrap; Marcus Kreiss hands out neon signs bearing the inscription ERRANCE to all the drivers roaming the streets between Metz and Luxembourg; Robert Milin, in cooperation with ASTI (association of immigrant workers) and UNIAO (association of Portuguese immigrants), opposes an allotment to the modern and sterile multi-storey buildings of the city; in Metz, Tania Mouraud sticks up eighty posters with the inscription "NI" written in big white letters on black background, thus shorning the common advertising posters of their grandiloquence; through a common project with the prisoners of the Maison d'arrêt of Metz, Lucy Orta sends messages from one side of the wall to the other, thus restoring speech from inside to outside and vice versa; by deambulating in the streets of Metz, Cécile Paris questions the close relationship between money and power, and the notion of individual choice; through his video installations Antoine Prum shows anonymous passers-by, whom he questions on the symbolics of the place (male prostitution); as for Angel Vergara, he partially revives a disused area of the Rue des Allemands in Metz by realizing actions in the deserted windows.All of the above-mentioned artists do not aim at creating a "public sculpture", but rather at communicating experiences to live on in the minds of the city-dwellers. The remaining "traces" of these actions will be presented in photographs, video films, tapes and other documents within the framework of the exhibition at Casino Luxembourg.