Gaïette > Atelier Faber & Anna Saint-Pierre, 2023

Wednesday February 15th, 2023 Nahil-Sarah Wehbé

Gaïette > Atelier Faber & Anna Saint-Pierre, 2023

Gaïette is installed at the foot of the Sabatier headframe, between slag heaps 174 and 175. Through its form, material, and sensory experience, this pictorial and landscape artwork recalls the mining past of the town and all the landscape, social, and economic upheavals associated with coal extraction, a symbolic material of the Anthropocene.

The artwork is conceived based on research into symbolic materials extracted from the landscape in connection with its transformation by industry and mining: coal and wood.

A shiny black coal paint, made from gaillettes (pieces of coal) collected on the slopes of the slag heaps around the Sabatier mine, covers wooden shingles made from Scots pine, painted by the residents and children of the town. These shingles are installed on four cylindrical wooden structures, replicating the diameters of the old mining shafts in the town (Sabatier and Vicoigne), thus revealing, through a spatial and sensory experience, the now almost invisible presence of the former mines.

The Scots pines from the Raismes forest, from which the shingles are made, hold very strong symbolic value: they were planted by the Germans after World War I as a means of reparations for the damage caused and were intended to be used for timbering and reinforcing the town’s mines.

The project was carried out with the residents, supported by the neighborhood houses of Sabatier and Vicoigne, with contributions from the students of ESAD Valenciennes, ENSA Paris-Belleville, the municipal team, and Étienne Vinet!

Informations & access

2023
(Français) À pied

Garden

Citizen gardens in the mining area

Raismes

The artist

Atelier Faber & Anna Saint-Pierre

ATELIER FABER: Founded by Gabriel Pontoizeau and Luca Antognoli in 2019, Atelier Faber focuses on the relationships between art, architecture, and landscape. Their work as artists, specializing in site-specific practice and art in public spaces, aims to restore the lost connection between humans and their environment by creating spaces that engage the senses of visitors, making the magic of reality perceptible. Gabriel Pontoizeau trained in the studios of Peter Zumthor and LVPH in Switzerland, as well as in the studios of Junya Ishigami and Go Hasegawa in Japan. For the past five years, he has been teaching design at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. Luca Antognoli joined Pascale Guédot's architecture firm in 2013 and worked there until 2018. Since September 2019, he has been teaching design in the undergraduate program at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville. ANNA SAINT-PIERRE: Anna Saint Pierre works on the memory of places through the collection and reuse of demolition materials. She is involved in architectural projects to identify future resources among deconstruction waste and to design second-life materials in situ: the memory of the former building becomes a component of the new project. A graduate of the "Textile and Material" department of the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2016, she earned a doctorate in 2022 in Sciences Arts Création Recherche (SACRe) with a thesis entitled "Textilizing Built Memory." Between 2018 and 2021, her research was supported by the ANRT to be integrated into projects by the architecture firm SCAU and was the subject of a residency at the laboratory of the Manufacture de Sèvres.