We spent one afternoon and night in Bordeaux en route to Paris. It is a lovely small city, with two gorgeous churches. A nice place to stop but not much to do. In retrospect we should have gone directly to Paris, as we got caught up in the TGV problems.
The CAPC Musee d’art contemporain de Bordeaux was the perfect place to spend some time. The building, built in 1824, was once a warehouse and now is a museum of contemporary art (est. 1973). The entire first floor was a retrospective of the work of Danish artist Nina Beier, entitled Auto.
Upstairs was an extraordinary exhibition of a current project by architect Xu Tiantian. The 3D models were beautiful, along with a good video describing the project further. The project is cool.
“The Empty Stones exhibition features one of her latest projects: the conversion of a disused underground quarry near the city of Taizhou in eastern China. The project aims to breathe new life into this enormous void by infusing it with a multiplicity of public activities. Drawings, models, photographs and videos will help to understand the project, while forging links with the local context. Indeed, despite the distance between China and France, the challenges of reconverting disused industrial heritage are the same. This question is all the more relevant in Gironde, a department which has a large number of underground quarries.” (AEX)
Other pieces on display from the museum’s collection that I enjoyed are below:
12 photographs
Cibachrome photograph
Fence and paper paste
Next up will be Paris!