![Happy Owners](https://afdelhi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/autumn-session-2017-beginners.jpg)
Alliance Française de Delhi and Studio X
present
a Photo Exhibition
Happy Owners
by Soazic Guezennec
Galerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Française de Delhi
72, Lodi Estate, New Delhi – 110003
Exhibition-on-view from 22nd January 2015 to 1st February 2015, 11am to 7pm
Soazic Guezennec, French artist living in Mumbai, is opening a new kind of real estate, displaying imaginary architectural projects which reinstate untamed nature inside the city.
Noticing the gap between the concept of “Nature City” plugged by the real estate adverts and the reality, Soazic Guezennec designs architectural projects which take the real estate slogans at their word, creating a city where nature would reassert itself, in a poetic and sometimes violent way. It gives birth to exuberant creations where buildings turn into waterfalls, mushrooms invade the town, mountains fall from the sky like landscape prostheses. In order to make this utopia credible, the projects are described on the classic supports of the real estate communication: videos, brochures, plans, models and advertisement posters.
Visitors are invited to express their desires and habitat dreams, and are encouraged to become members of the community of these highly subjective constructions.
SOAZIC’S LIFE
Soazic Guezennec, a Mumbai based French artiste is inspired by the conviction of associating man and nature.
“Despite the fact that I’ve lived in Mumbai for several years, I still continue to discover the city and its vast contrasts”, says Soazic who has lived in various parts of the city. Moving to India was a happy incident for her and her family. She and her husband love to travel and they took a year-long adventurous voyage traversing whole of Africa. They’ve stayed at numerous locations in entire world. The plan of coming to stay in India was made in a very short time when an interesting job post in Milk Dairy, Mumbai was offered to her. They came and settled in India with their son who has inherited Soazic’s passion for drawing.
Bringing the art to Mumbai…
“It’s in the family. My mother used to draw, so did my grandmother and her mother too… It’s just me who has taken this hobby so seriously and has developed it professionally”, she shares as she plays with her black-and-white stone necklace. Before her training in Beaux-Arts, Paris she undertook studies in commerce as at that time she wanted to work in art marketing but very soon she realised that she couldn’t manage the artists and that she was an artist herself. After she completed her training in Beaux-Arts, Soazic showcased her work in Chelsea Art Gallery in New York, in Women’s University of Seoul in Korea and Japan. She participated in a collective exhibition in Delhi with other contemporary Indian artists. “These days, artistic expressions resemble one another and have a lot in common. The European contemporary art in India remains however a bit pale, less exposed and less popular as of now”, she chooses her words and continues, “In India, there isn’t a lot of exchange within the artists’ community as compared to Europe. Here, the artists are friends with one another but it’s too rare that they frequent one another’s studios. They aren’t very receptive of critiques and prefer to remain discreet and could spend days in their studios. Contrary to this, I need to put myself in danger, to expose myself to adventurous experiences and to get in connect with the outside world.” she says passionately.
It has almost been a decade that Soazic is working on man and nature. She remembers well her voyage through the forests of Amazon where she went up a canoe river when she felt completely ‘absorbed’ in the nature, as if two walls of vegetation emerged and extended on both the sides of the river and she was nothing but another ‘natural’ element. She immediately desired to work on this sentiment, on the fragility and the force of nature by juxtaposing herself with nature. In the beginning, she launched herself in a red forest series; red, because it’s the colour of violence and also because the violence denotes weakness and vulnerability indicating the need for green. In Mumbai, she notices the tension between man and nature. “In Mumabi, I see trees growing up in walls, the moulds, and stains on buildings due to Sun and rain.” She explains, “Nature invades us like we invaded it.” Mumbai is a city with more than 20 million inhabitants but there isn’t a cut-off from nature as is the case in other metropolitan cities. She is surprised without really being astonished when she reads in the newspapers that a man was devoured by a crocodile in Powai or that a leopard has intruded in the house of a famous bollywood actress. Overwhelmed and surprised at the same time, Soazic takes inspiration from the tension between man and nature in Mumbai.
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