News
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Cloud | Metéoros
- Dates: 18 April 2013, 30 October 2013
- Venue: Barlow Shed, St Pancras International London
- Country: UK
- Type: Public sculpture commission
- Artwork: see the project
A suspended meeting place, the sky is the agora of our imagination. On April 18, 2013 Lucy + Jorge Orta unveil their monumental work Cloud | Metéoros at St Pancras International. As part of a new initiative titled Terrace Wires, the artists have been selected to create the very first public sculpture to be suspended in the Barlow Shed of the Eurostar terminal. The artwork will be a cardinal welcome to the nearly one million visitors to the station each week. Floating amid the glass-vaulted architecture of the historic Barlow Shed, Cloud | Metéoros resembles vast cumuli populated with travellers, a ‘magic carpet’ taking passengers on an imaginary journey in the skies. It also carries a more political message. The cloud calls into question how mankind will share the vital resource of water on earth. Meteoros is a word derived from ancient Greek, meaning raised from the ground, suspended, lofty or in the midst. Clouds have long been intercessors between reality and the imagination, between heaven and earth, lightness and gravity. They inhabit the skies of Renaissance fresco paintings, often depicted crowded with laymen and prophets, angels and deities. Throughout history, this celestial vault has been a site of conviviality, of learning and exchange. Terrace Wires is an initiative by HS1 Limited. This ambitious project finds its home in London alongside other annual public art commissions, including the Fourth Plinth, Turbine Hall at Tate Modern and the summer pavilion at Serpentine Gallery.
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Internaturalism
- Dates: 8 May 2013, 29 September 2013
- Venue: Parco Arte Vivente, Turin
- Country: Italy
- Type: Group exhibition
- Artwork: see the project
Drawn from semiologist Gianfranco Marrone’s theory of “internaturality,” the exhibition Internaturalism at PAV Turin poses a forceful critique of the Western and humanistic concept of nature. Installations, documentation, videos and sound-experiences cast doubt upon the culturally-specific hierarchies inherent to definitions of natural and non-natural in ways that challenge distinctions between human and non-human. Artists explore existential relationships among various forms of living to find a new means to define the environment and better policies to govern it. Amazonia (2010) is double projection video that draws the viewer into the Peruvian Amazon through stunning imagery and audio recorded by Lucy + Jorge Orta during their expedition there in 2009. We are guided into the rain forest by the voice of Gaia and, as the clouds dissipate, an unusual conversation between a man and a woman prompts us to reflect on the fragile balance between man and his natural environment: My centre is everywhere. Everything. Huge and hung together. The journey closes with a reflection on how we can shape the future: Touch the nation any Human Tug. At any moment Our future will move. The film was commissioned by the contemporary program at the Natural History Museum London in 2010 for a solo exhibition of works by the artists. The poetry was composed for the film by eco-poet Mario Petrucci.
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Artists’ Plans for Sustainability
- Dates: 2 May 2013, 22 June 2013
- Venue: Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry
- Country: UK
- Type: Group exhibition
- Artwork: see the project
In just a few decades, the world population will exceed 9 billion, 70% of which will live in cities. The exhibition Artists’ Plans for Sustainability at Mead Gallery, University of Warwick brings together plans for innovative and radical solutions to a more sustainable and resilient way of life. The exhibition will feature Lucy + Jorge Orta’s Hortirecycling Enterprise - Processing Unit (1999), an action highlighting local consumer waste and the inequalities of global food distribution. Over the span of a month and a half, Collect Units devised by the artists will be distributed to some of the 800 student kitchens on campus and used to gather discarded fruit and vegetables. The overripe produce will be turned into preserves by local chefs and made available for tasting at the Mead Gallery. This action brings university and community members together to illustrate the multiple possibilities of a recycling enterprise and to reconsider the point at which food becomes waste.
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Spirits of the Huveaune | Three new Spirits to be unveiled
- Dates: 6 April 2013, 6 April 2013
- Venue: Marseille, la vallée de l’Huveaune
- Country: France
- Type: Public sculpture commission
- Artwork: see the project
In honor of Marseille-Provence 2013 European Capital of Culture and Fondation de France’s Nouveaux commanditaire, Lucy + Jorge Orta present Le Chemin des Fées – Spirits of the Huveaune, a 30km parcours of sculptures across four municipalities that invite people to rediscover the Huveaune river’s rich cultural heritage.
The five Spirits of the Huveaune, feminine figures cast into bronze, are situated along the Huveaune river valley between the spring, deep in the Provence Alps, and the estuary at the Mediterranean, the ancient sea port of Massilia. The legendry, supernatural and the imaginary are the artists’ sources of inspiration collated from historical texts, local legends and stories recounting the feminine presence associated with the Huveaune river and the valley.
April 6, 2013 marks the inauguration of three such spirits: la Fée de la source - Marie at the Martellière, Saint-Zacharia; la Fée du pont - Ubelka at the Moulin Saint-Claude, Auriol; and la Fée des berges - Manon at the Îlot des Berges Park, Aubagne.
A fourth spirit, La Fée du vieux moulin (Gyptis), was unveiled in October 2012 in the Vieux Moulin Park, and the fifth and final spirit, la Fée du lac - Ophélie, will be inaugurated in Borély Park this coming May.
The spirits invest each site as genii loci, weaving a link between the past and present. Referring to the universal water cycle, Le Chemin des Fées aims to raise public awareness of environmental issues related to the river’s fate, particularly water management in the future, there as elsewhere.
Chemin des Fées was commissioned by the Association Rives et Cultures. -
9th Shanghai Biennale
- Dates: 2 October 2012, 31 March 2013
- Venue: Shanghai
- Country: China
- Type: Biennale
- Artwork: see the project
For the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Lucy + Jorge Orta are commissioned to make three large-scale interventions for the Museum of Contemporary Art: OrtaWater Purification Factory, Antarctica World Passport Delivery Village and Nexus Architecture.
OrtaWater Purification Factory is a fully functioning, mobile water purification system. The work will draw from Shanghai’s Huang Pu River and will pump water up 20 metres into the museum’s third floor. It will be purified in a bamboo ‘factory’ and then clean drinking water snaked around the museum for the visitors to taste, enjoy and take away in a specially designed OrtaWater bottle.
Due to the effects of global warming it is estimated that sea levels will raise 0.5 to 1.4 metres over the next 100 years. Antarctica World Passport Delivery Village is comprised of a collection of small huts made from reclaimed materials, erected on stilts and interconnected by a raised platform of bamboo. A Metisse Flag will indicate the delivery bureau, where a passport officer will hand out the third edition of the Antarctica World Passport. Printed in Chinese for the occasion of the Shanghai Biennale, tens of thousands of passports will be distributed to museum visitors. New members will be welcomed into the Antarctica world community based on the founding principles of the Antarctic Treaty.
Nexus Architecture is both an installation and a performance. These ephemeral interventions draw performers and passers-by alike into choreographed scenarios, later documented in photographs and on film. By climbing into specially conceived suits and zippering the Nexus, participants challenge the premise of interdependence, asserting chosen community as a means to personal liberation.
