FROM CLOUD TO CLOUD
Visual artist and researcher Marie-Luce Nadal hunts and captures clouds. The daughter of a long line of Catalan winemakers, she draws inspiration from the ancestral tradition of "cloud hunters" who fired rockets into the sky to protect crops from hail. Armed with a crossbow and sulfur-based ammunition, she performs "Making Clouds Weep 1 " at twilight, during that suspended moment at dusk when the birds fall silent. Documented through photographs and videos, these poetic performances unfold after a fencing duel. These rituals mark the practice at the intersection of art and science of this artist-engineer who, since her first cloud-capturing machine (created in 2015), has been striving to cultivate the intangible and manipulate the atmosphere.
Manipulating the atmosphere
Driven by a utopian dream, Marie-Luce Nadal captures cloud particles and remnants of electrical storms during her travels, reducing them to extracts before embedding them in "eoloriums" (cloud aquariums). These are the very same ones you can acquire by committing to maintain them (by supplying them with water).
“I wanted to create a cloud in a box so that I could finally say that it is possible to play with clouds as one plays with fire,” explains the artist, who confronts us, if not with transcendence, then at least with the human obsession with controlling and dominating the natural world. Housing “fragments of imprisoned territory,” “microcosms subject to the random will of air masses that condense into swirls,” these cloud aquariums are also, for the artist, a way to “capture the ephemeral to protect it from the passage of time,” 2 while we witness their metamorphosis, the cloud fragments, sensitive to light and temperature, constantly evolving and transforming.
1 – Title of an outdoor performance that began in 2015
A graduate of the Montpellier National School of Architecture (ENSAM) in 2009 and the National School of Decorative Arts (ENSAD) in 2012, Marie-Luce Nadal (born in 1984 in Catalonia) also studied at PSL Research University (Paris Sciences & Lettres) within the laboratory of the École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielle de Paris (ESPCI). She exhibited her " Fabrique des Nuages" (Cloud Factory) in 2015 at the Palais de Tokyo and her video "Faire pleurer les nuages" (Making Clouds Cry) in 2021 at the French Institute in Helsinki. She also participated in the Novacène exhibition at the UTOPIA Lille 3000 festival in 2022.
"Celestial War – Marie-Luce Nadal"
The Royal Bach Ice Rink
15, rue Veydt, Brussels (Belgium)
Until March 9, 2024
AND ALSO:
“Marie-Luce Nadal, A Summer of Celebrations” in “ART Situacions III”
Fiminco Foundation
43, rue de la Commune-de-Paris, Romainville
Until April 7, 2024
