No-one sets off from 0!: from km 0 to Monsieur Hulot’s beach
Saint-Nazaire , September 2018 - July 2019
Saint-Nazaire is a city offering multiple artistic perspectives.
The city, largely built around the submarine base, a veritable monument of the Anthropocene era, also boasts a naval base where the largest cruise ships in the world are built; it conveys a powerful image which has seduced many artists. Estuaire first turned it into a playground, by inviting Felice Varini and Gilles Clément to take over the naval base; the Escales festival then took up the challenge, commissioning a series of monumental murals on the facades of building. There are many other artistic interventions in public spaces around the city. Conscious of this artistic wealth, the city of Saint-Nazaire decided to make it into a cornerstone of its cultural programming
and launched a mission to define a public art strategy.
We responded to the challenge by designing a format that combined research and concrete action.
Rather than producing yet another report, we opted for a role-playing strategy as a way of exploring the question concretely through an artistic experiment based on a study and an analysis of the public art in Saint-Nazaire and elsewhere, designed in collaboration with Alexis Fichet, from the
collective Lumière d’août.