Anne and Patrick Poirier. Memories of ruins.

MAMAC invites Anne and Patrick Poirier to resonate their works on the whole of the Nice/Cimiez Archeology Museum.

The works of this mythical couple, which has been working for more than fifty years in the construction of fictional archaeologies, deploy with grandeur in the Roman ruins and ancient collections. This is the first time that artists invest a site museum by engaging both outdoors (on the archaeological site) and indoors (in permanent collections and exhibition spaces).

Roman lovers, the birthplace of their common artistic practice, Anne and Patrick Poirier have been building unaccompanied civilizations since 1968. Their material: real or dreamy dreams, memories of trips and archaeological sites. Their goal: to see, feel and share the fragile experience of the world, the imperative need for memory.
The couple imagined himself architect and archaeologist, built labyrinths, mental maps, utopian museum plans, traces of fragmentary cities. These theatres of memory reveal our humanity, our power to build, dream, imagine and the vital need to preserve, not forget in order to know oneself and the world, so that we can continue to live.

Archaeological collections to the ruins of the Roman Baths, sculptures, installations and photographs of the artists resonate with the past and memory of the place. The works are affirmed in the face of the weight of history, and are based in the meanders of time. In the basement of the museum, the space dedicated to artists makes it possible to deepen the challenges of their approach, based on the memory and vestiges to evoke the fragility of cultures and the transmission of knowledge.

The exhibition unpublished When I try to visualize..., a large marble engraved and enhanced to the gold leaf. This work, presented in the personal exhibition of artists at the Ponchettes gallery in Nice in 1981, is part of the collections of MAMAC.

Designed specifically for the site of the Museum of Archaeology of Nice/Cimiez, the exhibition draws a sensitive and poetic journey nestled with an alert vision of the contemporary world. She invites to look at the collections of the Nice/Cimiez Archaeology Museum with a work deeply nourished by archaeology, utopia and psyche. Anne and Patrick Poirier make this place of history a meditation space on the precarious balance of humanity.