CHARLOTTE PRINGUEY CESSAC

December 6, 2019 to July 27, 2020

MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART M.A.M.A.C

Experience a journey back in time with the exhibition Noise originated. The first traces of human occupation in Nice 400,000 years ago, the testimony of the carved stones left by this community and the experiences carried out today by the artist Charlotte Pringuey-Cessac summon the vibrant memory of these past lives.

Prehistory, the tools and methodologies of archaeology constitute for Charlotte Pringuey-Cessac a source for her work, a material from which she weaves experiences and narratives, allowing herself to wander between science and poetic license, the trace left by history and her contemporary reinvention.

Thought to be a journey, his exhibition in Nice is spread from the Museum of Prehistory of Terra Amata, epicenter of the activity of these first men, to the MAMAC, passing through the hill of the castle where, in 2013, was discovered a tomb populated with funerary remains dating from the 12th and 13th centuries.

This walk through the centuries revolves around the idea of an original Noise, an expression borrowed from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. After he discovered with wonder the potential of the first phonographs, he dreams of "an incredible thing": "to put into sound the countless signatures of creation that last in the skeleton, in the stone, (...), the crack in the wood, the gait of an insect", and to hear the memory of a missing being by traversing the furrows of the skull with the apparatus... Between romantic thought and semiurgical fantasy, Rilke's aspiration to re-animate absence is a common thread of Charlotte Pringuey-Cessac's proposal.

The summoning of a bygone world, the intimate dialogue with the witnesses of the past and the magical thought from which it invests what seems inert, draw a sensitive ode to the memory and rustles of what is no longer: our origins.

Exhibition commission: Hélène Guenin, director of MAMAC and Bertrand Roussel, director of the Nice Archaeology Museums