Anne and Patrick Poirier: a 4-stage itinerary in the South

After a noteworthy exhibition programme in Southern France this summer (please read below), it is now MRAC Occitanie’s turn to celebrate the duo’s pioneering nature and the visionary accuracy of their issues and themes since their beginning.

Designed as a mnemonic walk through more than fifty years of their work, this daring exhibition curated by Clément Nouet, director of the museum, closely probes into the psyche and the force emanating from their work.

Bringing together a large set of works rarely shown to the public (some of them date back to the early 1970s, others were produced in 2020 during the lockdown), this exhibition unveils a protean work of great formal, material and scale diversity. It includes their notebooks, herbaria, photographs, as well as their famous constructions of imaginary city states developed as models, often on a large-scale.

The title, La mémoire en filigrane (memory between the lines), alone shows an ongoing obsession in their work: fighting against oblivion.

For more than forty years, Anne and Patrick Poirier have been travelling the world and creating from its ruins, in search of poetry and keys to better understand the history of the world and the collapse of civilisations.

The violence in history, in time destroying everything… Although their universe - filled with goddesses, Latin phrases, and dried flowers – is imbued with some darkness, poetry always prevails.

Witnessing the fragility of humanity and the world, they say they could have seen themselves in the role of architects or archaeologists, occupations they have declared to the authorities rather than artists to avoid suspicion or to play, from their first trips, including to the Middle East.

During their media appearances, they speak with one voice, apparently united facing the value of the topics they tackle: “individual memory, but above all memory of the world, humanity, communities, languages…”. Both trained in Decorative Arts in Paris and marked by the Second World War’s destructions, they decided to combine their talents for good after a residency at the Villa Medici in 1967. They therefore signed their first joint works and have stayed together ever since. It has been a winning formula, judging by their career: from the MoMA, New York to the Venice Biennale, the couple has been presenting exhibitions worldwide, developing a poetic work nurtured by all types of trips and excavations (in the ground, in literature, in history…).

This summer, their iconic signature was in the limelight in three venues of the Plein Sud network: at the Château la Coste and the Abbaye du Thoronet (two exhibitions curated by Laure Martin-Poulet), and at the Domaine du Muy, the Galerie Mitterrand’s private sculpture park which represents the artists in France.

The exhibition at the Château La Coste inaugurated last April revolved around one of their famous miniature architectural creation: Mnémosyne (1990). Fully covered in white, it is named after the Greek goddess of memory.

At the link Abbaye du Thoronet, they designed a tour of unprecedented works engaging all five senses, approaching this mystical venue as the “soul of the world”. “The buildings correspond to different functions of the brain”, as explained by the couple who often works through metaphors. Urban space and psychic space overlay and merge, as the erosion of a material refers to a dissipating memory.

At the Domaine du Muy, among new creations and older works, the duo displayed all summer long their series Roma, memoria mundi (1988), from 14 May to 11 July. Photographs of Roma were enhanced with green or pink, bearing the shimmering colours of memory, in the way we all embellish our own memories. Finally, archaeology and architecture are one side of the same coin: the first looks back on the past, the second looks to the future.