MATZA

MATZA AMBOY / PRESS RELEASE 2016
LE GLACIER COMME EXPERIENCE MIROIR
DU DESERT
Si l’exposition à Amboy est à voir jusqu’au printemps
prochain, les Alpes suisses vont accueillir en septembre
la première édition de MATZA Aletsch. Conçue
comme une véritable expérience-miroir du désert,
l’équipe de MATZA Amboy 2015 fera face cette année
à l’altitude, au froid et à une autre forme d’isolement.
L’eau se transforme ici en désert de glace que les
participants exploreront. Derrière le symbole qu’il
représente aujourd’hui, le glacier sera disséqué sous
ses diverses dimensions écologiques, morphologiques,
économiques, mais également culturelles et esthétiques.
Le séjour se déroulera d’abord durant deux
jours à Belalp puis à la cabane de Konkordia, face au
glacier, à 2850 m d’altitude.
La résidence à Aletsch aura lieu du 5 au 18 septembre
2016, avec un vernissage à la cabane de la Konkordia
le samedi 17 septembre auquel le public est cordialement
convié.
When MATZA brings together artists, researchers
and residents to explore and
reflect upon issues connecting land, the
collective use of natural resources and
democracy.
Following on from the success of the first MATZA in
the Mojave desert in 2015, this year sees the second
edition of MATZA Amboy in California, and the first
MATZA Aletsch, the Swiss part of the project. Those
who took part in the 2015 project will set off to explore
the glacier in September, while a new team of artists,
architects and a town planner will be on their way
home from California with an exhibition in Amboy that
will run until next Spring.
In 2016 MATZA will thus continue to explore and examine
two environments that are as fragile as they are
powerful, that of the glacier and the desert, each in its
own way an indicator of contemporary climate issues.
One suffers from drought, the other from the melting of
the glaciers, but both are symptoms of an age challenged
more and more by water scarcity and by the privatization
of resources. MATZA uses this raw material
as a way of highlighting the frequent squabbling over
natural resources that takes place nowadays, but also
as a way of considering how land could in fact be a liberating
factor in the creation of new forms of communal
living. MATZA is therefore a tool for geographical
exploration as much as a collective human experience,
seeking to stimulate innovative means of collaboration
between its participants.
Its work is already being rewarded in Amboy, since for
the second time now 8 artists, architects and geographers
have immersed themselves in this corner of
the desert that has been more or less abandoned to
the crushing 50 degree-plus heat. Not a fate that had
been envisaged for this region, but rather one that has
been forced upon it by a fiftieth consecutive year of
drought and the necessity of rationing available water.
The urgency of the situation inspired MATZA together
with UNDERGROUNDS to bring their dual viewpoint
to bear on all that lies hidden in the landscape, on the
invisible factors that influence it, but also on the need
to seek a radical new alternative to the way we use our
resources.
Architects at Bureau A, Léopold Banchini and Daniel
Zamarbide, in collaboration with the artist Maxime
Bondu, have created a collection of installations in
Amboy entitled GHOST DROP, based around the
desalination of water through evaporation, leading to
the rather random but highly probable development of
an oasis in the desert. Delphine Renault has focussed
on differing cultural and spatial references, by using
a bulldozer to sketch out the rectilinear outlines of a
French-style garden, JARDIN A LA FRANCAISE, and
by painting a pedestrian crossing across Route 66.
Katharina Hohmann on the other hand has chosen to
use the disused school nearby to link, through THERE
IS NO WATER ON THE MOON, the history of Amboy
and its inhabitants with that of space conquest. Thierry
Maeder, with THE VISITOR CENTER, has taken a look
at the topography of Amboy by constructing a model
of the site and a system for cataloguing its history.
Through WHAT THE GLOBAL WARMING FUCK, his
installation in a cosy bungalow, Frédéric Choffat calls
into question our occasionally shortsighted behavior,
and Laurence Piaget’s THE AGONIZING GLACIER now
graces the desert horizon with a gigantic representation
of the Rhône glacier in its state of sufferance.
Finally, Séverin Guelpa has made his mark on the
landscape with a matze, a totem symbolizing unity and
emancipation, into which each visitor is invited to drive
a nail as a show of support.
THE GLACIER AS A MIRROR TO THE DE-
SERT
The exhibition in Amboy can be seen until next Spring,
but in the meantime there will also be the first edition of
MATZA Aletsch in the Swiss Alps in September. Matza
Aletsch is intended as an experience to mirror that of
Matza Amboy. After extreme heat and lack of water,
the team that took part to the first edition of Matza
Amboy in 2015 will be faced with cold, high altitude
and a different kind of solitude. This time the desert will
be one of ice, where the participants will investigate
what lies behind the national symbol that is Aletsch: the
complex world of the glacier, from the legends that surround
it to the micro-organisms that inhabit its waters.
The participants will first stay in Belalp for two days
to acclimatize, then at the Konkordia mountain hut at
an altitude of 2,850 meters overlooking the majestic
Aletsch glacier. The residency in Aletsch will take place
between September 5 to 18. The opening will take
place at the Konkordia hut on September 17 at 4 pm.
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