Le Voyage à Nantes | Estuaire | Les Tables de Nantes | Les Machines de l’île | Château des ducs de Bretagne | Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage
Indre

“Serpentine rouge”
Jimmie Durham


The strange “industrial animal” rising out of the pontoon is composed of tubing that calls to mind a seaserpent or a dragon over 40 metres (43 yards) long. It leaps out of the water, creeping and rearing up to face the Loire, its “mouth wide open”. The snake symbolizes the river, and the tubing represents a “conduit” for the imagination, breaking the walls – while linking them together – between spaces and hierarchies: water/sky, over/under, visible/invisible, past/future…

Jimmie Durham is a Cherokee, born in Arkansas in 1940. Visual artist and political activist for the American Indian Movement and civil rights, he now lives in Europe. Advocating total freedom, Jimmie Durham questions the art establishment and its hierarchical system. His work systematically staggers his audience. By altering common objects, found or recovered, and turning them into mysterious creatures out of a curiosity lab, symbols of the existence of an imaginary world, he describes what is out of reality, what is strange.
Referring to the “wild thinking” concept and the Outsider Art, his work references language, words, images, DIY aesthetic and offers an ironic take on ethnographical conventions.

DURHAM

To be seen from the landing stage of the ferryboat in Basse-Indre.


Artwork audio commentary