Alice Anderson was invited to install her works in dialogue with the permanent collection at the Musée d’Art moderne de Fontevraud in the museum's Connexions/Collections series.
Dominique Gagneux: We explained why we have chosen you for this first Connections/Collections at the Fontevraud Modern Art Museum. Your artistic practice, based on ritual performances, brings about sculptures that are woven in copper coloured thread, starting from extremely slow movements of “memorization”.
Alice Anderson: “Each object has a certain power that goes well beyond its simple primary function. As far as I am concerned, I have always bound to nonhuman entities. As such, objects have the power to interact amongst themselves as well as with us, using a universal language that I intrinsically find in dance. Dancing is a reconnection to the Nature that we have in us.
I do not make choices based on some aesthetic criteria. When I visited the museum rooms, I rather reacted to what some entities gave out. The granary shutter from the Dogon people of Mali stays vividly in my mind. I also recall the sitting statuette of the Remojadas from Mexico, the funeral mask of the Chancay from Central Peru, the statuettes of ibeji twins from the Nigerian Yoruba, the feminine idols of the Greek Cyclades, one of the tea bowls (chawan) from Japan and the birdstones from the North American Mound Builders people.
Generally speaking, I try to show the importance of aboriginal cosmovisions— here Amerindian— of new discoveries in quantic physics, metaphysics, poetry, trance, meditation and the positive aspects of the collective group. To some extent, that’s what I wanted to show here, with these entities side by side, which start a dialogue that I hope will continue for visitors, well beyond the museum walls.
