Le Voyage à Nantes Takes Over The City Again: 30th June – 26th August 2018
Who wants to join me? The French city of Nantes will present its seventh edition of the citywide arts festival Le Voyage a Nantes. The festival will celebrate art and culture from 30th June – 26th August 2018 in one of France’s most dynamic and creative cities, set on the Loire River in Western France.
As befits the birthplace of the writer Jules Verne, the Festival will host a collection of weird and wonderful artworks located throughout the city, providing a rich and entertaining art trail. New artwork sits alongside pieces from previous years while exhibitions and interventions scattered around the streets, quays and squares of Nantes, are all linked by a ten-mile long green line. Artists, designers, gardeners, cooks, DJs and graffiti artists are invited to express their creativity in public spaces creating market gardens, street art and sculpture for the local community and the thousands of tourists who visit Nantes in the summer for the Festival. Artistic Director Jean Blaise has been instrumental in transforming the city from one that was in serious decline to a cultural powerhouse through permanent and temporary artistic attractions created by both French and international artists – he says: “The idea of the festival is to colonise every part of town with artistic creation”.
Last year’s cultural highlight was the long-awaited re-opening of the Musée d’Arts de Nantes, one of the largest Fine Arts museums outside Paris, transformed and extended by the London-based architectural practice Stanton Williams. This year, the Musée will play host to an array of site specific installations as part of Le Voyage à Nantes, emphasising its purpose as a vibrant and welcoming contemporary space that is open to the city and its people. The Nantes School of Architecture and the newly opened Nantes School of Art are situated within the historic shipyards, creating a unique architectural footprint for the city.
Visitors can also explore the city’s former shipyards, closed in 1987, which have undergone an architectural renaissance, with new roads, buildings and developments all springing up in what was formerly derelict land, utilizing and transforming the abandoned industrial buildings and disused warehouses there into galleries and bars buzzing with the dynamic beat of art and culture which is at the heart of Nantes. Justly, Nantes has now gained a reputation for being one of France’s most creative cities with Le Voyage à Nantes as the jewel in its crown.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
