Closing – Water's sorrow is endless

Our dreams are translucent: they build as much as they destroy. Sometimes they are the same dreams, viewed from opposite shores.

The Maisons Castors in Villeurbanne were born of a collective dream: that of the postwar era, of families who built the spaces of their own lives with their own hands, using shovels and pickaxes. A dream of dignity and putting down roots on land that was once prone to flooding. These houses stand on sand, on the former bed of the Rhône. During heavy storms, water still floods some basements. They stand on water. They always have.

Since 2017, another dream has come to overshadow them: a bridge, carrying the promise of better access and the threat of expropriation. Amid the urgency of the initial consultations, the residents mobilized. Something unexpected emerged: a new collective. Some chose to leave. Others stayed.

It is in this space, shaped by the history of a bridge that never came to be, that Élodie Tranchant and Jérôme Dupré la Tour present Water's sorrow is endles*. Through a series of visual and video works, they explore the dream from its edges: not the triumphant dream, but the dream as a flow and as an absence. Water flows through the exhibition just as it flows through this neighborhood : not as an obstacle, but as a passage. A text by the artist Fabien Pinaroli will accompany the images in a cross-disciplinary edition.

*Gaston Bachelard

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