Un Nouveau festival

An occasion celebrating a multi-disciplinary approach and new experiences: a laboratory of new forms of contemporary creation proposed by different artists and creators.

What if there were an "art of forgetting" again today, just as in distant times there was one consubstantial to "the arts of remembering"? What if the art of our time, in all its various forms, saw in it a "creative principle", like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche? The Centre Pompidou presents the fifth edition of its Nouveau Festival: an occasion celebrating a multi-discipline approach and new experiences, and a laboratory of new forms of contemporary creation proposed by artists and creators from every kind of backgrounds. A fifth edition that takes risks in terms of oblivion and reminiscence!

In the Galerie Sud, the exhibition area previously devoted to Pierre Huyghe is re-used, in a way that infiltrates the maze designed by the artist, and catches the memory out. In this area, the choreographer Xavier Le Roy is invited to exhibit dance, with "Retrospective". Here, for the three weeks of the Nouveau Festival, performers endeavour to remember and perform works from the artist's repertory to an audience. As an echo of the encounter with Xavier Le Roy, the Galerie Sud is hosting a number of past and present works haunted in many respects by oblivion. Marcel Duchamp, Ed Ruscha, Rémy Zaugg, Mel Bochner, Tim Maul, Stephen Prina, Pierre Bismuth, Wim Delvoye, Matthew Buckingham, Arno Gisinger, Olaf Nicolai, Mario Garcia Torres, Joachim Koester and Didier Rittener, among others, are seen alongside proposals by Tris Vonna-Michell, Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmusand and a generation that mingles every discipline involved in contemporary creation, with Stefan Sulzer, Mark Geffriaud, Sébastien Rémy, Alex Cecchetti, Jeremiah Day, Simon Fujiwara, Marie Lund & Nina Beier, Meris Angioletti and many others.

Like a space that houses archives and memories, a recomposed past and a living memory, this edition is the opportunity to rediscover the Furkart experiment: a "lost" space in the heart of the Swiss Valais, where for nearly twenty years the most outstanding artists left physical traces of their passing. In the heart of the Centre Pompidou, in Forum -1, film director Charles de Meaux is the inspired driver of a "Ghost Train". The pipes inviting the public to discover the film produced for the occasion are reminiscent of one of the most emblematic features of the Centre Pompidou's architecture, rising up like a hydra right in the middle of the space. When the train arrives, the visitors/passengers are offered a rare selection of films by artists who have collaborated with Charles de Meaux, as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Melvil Poupaud and Lawrence Weiner.

This year, Vidéodanse has close links with the Nouveau Festival at the Centre Pompidou, which is hosting it in Espace 315. And could there be a better way of approaching the history of dance than through the prism of a past remembered from the present? To quote Valérie Da Costa, the curator of this profoundly reworked edition, "the relationship between memory and oblivion is probably the kernel at the heart of every choreographic gesture."

This fifth edition is also an occasion develop numerous proposals in the theatres. Guests include Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, Miguel Gutierrez and Ivo Dimchev. This time, words are a key feature, with daily get-togethers where writers, philosophers, artists and critics explore the relationship between oblivion and reminiscence in literature and all the human sciences. Among the guests Jean-Pierre Criqui readily finds "Eblouis par l'oubli" ("dazzled by oblivion") are Simon-Daniel Kipman, who seeks "The palette of forgetfulness", Sabina Loriga and "Historical Oblivion", a Nathalie Quintane half-way between "Oblivion and Literature", Milad Doueihi who focuses on "Digital oblivion", and Peter Szendy, who considers "Music and Oblivion". Lastly Jacques Aumont invites us to the cycle he has devised on the theme of amnesia. With Alain Bergala, Laurent Jullier, Dork Zabunian, Hervé Aubron, Vinzenz Hediger and Aumont himself, we look at a selection of films by Nanni Moretti, George Stevens, the Dziga Vertov group, Matt Reeves, Jürgen Böttcher and Shôhei Imamura.

The fifth edition of the Centre Pompidou Nouveau Festival thus involves three weeks of forgetting that you are sure to remember!