May 28-30, 2009 (open daily from 4-9pm)
Opening: May 28th at 7:30 pm
Hotel Catalonia Ramblas Pelayo, 28
08001 Barcelona
ROOM 27
Pierre-François Ouelllette art contemporain (Montreal) is delighted to premiere a new video by Isabelle Hayeur entitled Losing Ground at the 4th edition of the LOOP video art fair ( http://www.loop-barcelona.com/ ) . The fair, which runs from May 28-30, 2009 in Barcelona is one of the premiere worldwide venues for the presentation of new video work. This will be the fourth consecutive year that the gallery has participated in the fair having previously premiered new videos by Adad Hannah and Michel de Broin.
For information on hours of operation and tickets as well as general information on LOOP please visit the fair's website at:
http://www.loop-barcelona.com/
For more information on Isabelle Hauyer please visit her official website: http://www.isabelle-hayeur.com
The gallery would like to thank the Canada Council and the Bureau du Québec à Barcelone for their assistance
LOSING GROUND
Isabelle Hayeur’s work is situated within an ecological and urbanist critique. Having lived in the suburbs for twenty years, she witnessed the spectacle of urban sprawl and the many disappearances that go along with it. Marked by this experience, her approach is informed by environmental concerns and issues of land use and regional development. She is particularly concerned with feelings of alienation, uprootedness, and dislocation.
Since the late 1990s, she has been articulating a critique of urban sprawl and the resulting erosion and homogenization of the countryside across the world. With its negation of city history, of geographic particularities, and thus of cultural memory, this standardized urbanization imposes its amnesia, individualistic lifestyle, and jarring presence in nature. Rapid technological transformations of all kinds have disrupted the natural and rural milieu, producing an artificial, standardized environment. This world has become malleable, subject to our will, to our imaginations; more than ever, it bears the identifying imprint of our developed societies.
Losing Ground is an experimental video that sounds out recently man-made territories so as to decipher humanity’s relationships with the environment and, more profoundly, to shed light on contemporary forms of existence and modes of thought. It confronts us with the dizzying spectacle of our diminishing local references, as they give way to cultural stereotypes, now become universal through globalization.
Isabelle Hayeur would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and Arid Sea Films.
TEXTO EN ESPAÑOL
LOSING GROUND
La obra de Isabelle Hayeur se encuadra dentro de la perspectiva de una crítica ecológica y urbanística. Al haber vivido en los suburbios durante unos veinte años, ha conocido de cerca el espectáculo de la urbanización desaforada y las numerosas desapariciones que la acompañan. Su enfoque está relacionado con esta experiencia y se alimenta de los discursos que rodean la cuestión medioambiental, así como de las problemáticas de ordenación del territorio. Se interesa especialmente por las sensaciones de alienación, desarraigo y dislocación.
Desde finales de los años noventa, realiza una crítica de la urbanización horizontal que destruye los paisajes y los uniformiza en casi todo el mundo. Este urbanismo estandarizado, que es una negación de la ciudad histórica, de las particularidades geográficas y, por tanto, de la memoria cultural, impone a los hombres su amnesia, su estilo de vida individualista y su improbable presencia a la naturaleza. La aceleración de las transformaciones tecnológicas de todo tipo ha generado unos cambios radicales de los medios naturales y rurales produciendo un entorno ficticio y estandarizado. Este mundo, que se ha vuelto maleable, sometido a nuestra voluntad y a nuestra imaginación, tiene más que nunca la impronta identitaria de nuestras sociedades desarrolladas.
El vídeo experimental Losing Ground explora los territorios recientemente transformados por el hombre para descifrar en ellos las relaciones que mantiene con su entorno y, más profundamente, mostrar sus modos de existencia y de pensamiento. Nos obliga a enfrentarnos de forma vertiginosa a la pérdida de referencias locales en beneficio de estereotipos culturales que, con la globalización, se han vuelto universales.