La Friche des rails

While you’re attending the festival, check out La Friche des rails, a fun, poetic set design installed in the abandoned railway yard in Annecy’s Trois Fontaines neighborhood.

To create this installation the Bruit du frigo collective drew on the site’s strong identity. A collection of unusual railroad cars travel along imaginary rails through plants growing wild on the site. These wooden platforms can be used in many ways: as picnic or gaming tables, lounge chairs, stands, stages, etc. They also provide a place to be with your kids, family, or friends, and enjoy festive cultural events. Graphic interventions coordinated by the Annecian collective Art By Friends liven up the installation: the cars and the ground provide backdrops for Swiss artist Rylsee’s imaginative work and the neighboring hangar’s blank wall hosts a giant fresco by the German collective Low Bros.

This project is supported by the elected representatives of Commune nouvelle d’Annecy as part of a program of public investments to rehabilitate this neighborhood. Based on this installation and its standard practice, Ville d’Annecy will begin a public consultation and citizen participation process that will contribute to the neighborhood’s urban redevelopment plan for the next three years. This is the first time Annecy Paysages will contribute its know-how to one of Ville d’Annecy’s urban renewal projects. It may open the door to citizen participation in future transformations of the city. It definitely puts art and cultural awareness at the heart of this process.

The artist Sophie Weidler-Bauchez intervenes on the ground with the realization of a monumental map of the district.

The urban creation collective Bruit du frigo was created in 1997. Located in Bordeaux (France), it is a collection of architects, artists, urban planners, mediators, and builders. Clearers of space, initiators of new practices, and generators of urbanity, they take a quirky, fun, poetic approach. At the intersection of art, land, and population, their approach aims to promote the transition to sustainable, shared, and welcoming urban development.