There are birds in the aquarium
“There are birds in the aquarium” is an exhibition with ten mechanized sculptures of French artist Magali Rousseau.
Magali Rousseau
Hawker of unusual objects
Now a builder and manipulator of mechanical and poetic objects, Magali Rousseau studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. She there trained herself in the metal, wood, and jewelry workshops and won the Voecklin Awards and honors in 2008.
In her studio, she gives life to her objects with cranks and motors, but also develops systems that operate by fire, water, air, flow of material. She creates scenography and mechanisms for theatre companies. She participated in all the creations of the company Les Anges au Plafond for 10 years. She also worked with La Machine in Nantes, Antigua y Barbuda in Barcelona, and Mal Pelo in Girona. Ready for take off was born from her desire to take all her machines on stage to show us what they are capable of!
My machines are deeply human, they are pathetic, funny, sad, gentle, aggressive, determined, helpless.
They flee, drag their legs, move, wrestle, go around in circles, stir air, …
I feel like a director and my sculptures make theater, they tirelessly repeat the same gestures and trying in their
own way to tell us their story.
These machines create a space, their space, that of the narration.
They call to our sensitivity to beings and things.
To our ability to feel, to play, to understand.
I’m looking for micro-disturbances.
I look at the movements that surround me, the forms of energy present in nature, their change, their mutation…
Through the movement, I want to reach a different life, an elsewhere where the attention is focused around subtle movements, regular or chaotic, fragile organisms that evolve according to their own rules.
Very often, I can not find the words and I do not speak. So I build objects to break the silence. In my workshop, I build, weld, hanger, cut, assemble, drill, grind, hack … to give life to mechanical and poetic
objects, metaphorical machines that combine natural and mechanical elements.
I like movement, the inert bores me.
I am interested in mechanical language as a way to describe and understand the living.
I make steel beings that populate a particular area of our imagination.
The abyssal world is fascinating and terrifying, I am afraid of the monsters of the seabed, they embody those who inhabit me and devour me inside me. So I made a smiling whale and adopted a red fish. And one day a bird came to land on the edge of the aquarium.
These steel beings are only our mirror, a materialization of our desires, our fears, our chimeras. And it is up to the viewer to wake up these unconscious and amorphous machines, to breathe life into them by cranks or motors that are operated by pressing switches …
This is my theater of illusion.
In cooperation and support with Studio ALTA /www.altart.cz/ and the French Institute in Prague.
Place: Studio ALTA – west part of Invalidovna Karlín, event room
Opening:
13.7. 18:00 – 21:00 grand opening
14.7. – 25.7. 14:00 – 21:00
ENTRY FREE
