In Capc de Bordeaux, art is set in a greenhouse – Liberation

Three small jars behind a window, filled with a yellow powder. Hazelnut pollen, From the German Wolfgang Laib, was acquired by the Center for Contemporary Art in Bordeaux (CAPC) in 1992. The pollen, harvested by hand by the artist during long steps, can indifferently be presented in the museums locked up in his pots, as we enclose the memory of a sandy beach, or poured on the ground and spread to form an ocher and powdery rectangle, like a light and unstable monochrome. Extremely fragile – its magnetic yellow is no longer entirely also radiant -, the installation, like all works from natural materials, continues its small life within the museum: its color turns, the material is altering, or will necessarily alter itself. It can also continue to exercise its power of attraction on insects. She acts, she transforms. And keeps inspiring: it is now at the origin of the new presentation of the CAPC collection, precisely entitled Pollen And offered to visitors for the next two years.

This new course follows a path already taken by other exhibitions in recent years (the least we can say): the relationship to nature, a source of fascination but the object of destruction, the living, the deadly extractivism … But the exhibition of CAPC adds a reflection on the museum as an ecosystem, well forced to do with the secret life of things, sometimes alive, that it is supposed to keep.