We’re finally free to roam around!
Annecy paysages provides another way of relating to culture and art in the urban environment. It requires you to take your time. It questions again and again our place as individuals in nature and as part of a group, asking if we are consumers of or contributors to this culture?
Annecy paysages also raises questions in sensitive essays about the role nature and art play in urban development. Underlying all of these questions is the need for balance between city and nature, for a slower pace, for thinking urgently about how unobtrusive the footprints our collective development leaves behind should be.
Annecy paysages focuses particularly on the concept of a “landscape” composed of historical or natural heritage sites. The events’ works and installations update how we look at these sites. Beyond the traditional and romantic relationship to the sites’ beauty, they suggest ways to put these landscapes in context and make them functional, to erase the nature/culture distinction. The environment is no longer what surrounds us, but the whole of which we are a part because of our personal histories, or simply because we belong to the living.
For the 2021 edition we’ve invited fifty artists, architects, designers, and landscape designers to reinterpret the city’s historical, urban, or natural heritage sites.
Forty installations create a remarkable itinerary through the major historical sites, with the canal du Thiou and the rediscovery of the waterway through the city: Palais de l’Île courtyard, esplanade de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, canal du Thiou, bassin des Cordeliers, Île Saint-Joseph, quai de la Cathédrale, place Notre-Dame, canal du Vassé, the train station forecourt, esplanade Paul Grimault, the Bonlieu wall and Forum, and quai de Vicenza; through nature sites with the big parks, lake shore, and gardens: Jardins de l’Europe, Annecy Lake, Parc Charles-Bosson, Île des Cygnes, the Haras, quai Jules-Philippe, promenade Jacquet, square de l’Évêché, and quai de Bayreuth; and through our industrial heritage with abandoned sites in the Trois Fontaines neighborhood, where there used to be artisans’ workshops and industry.
With support from Ville d’Annecy, région AURA, the Haute-Savoie department, the Culture Ministry, the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, and the FEDER fund, this festival has become one of Annecy’s cultural high points.
In only 4 editions, this reinterpretation of the city’s cultural heritage has been able to attract a very broad public, which observers of Annecy’s tourist levels put at more than a million visitors.
SG
