Carla Adra is a French-Canadian artist born in Toronto in 1993.
Performance is one of the mediums Carla Adra uses to reinvent our relationship with the world and with others. Drawing on research into psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, and alternative pedagogies, she creates special time-spaces for intimate encounters.
Her project revolves around discourse and the socio-cultural limits surrounding it in both public and intimate spaces. She proposes to abolish conventions in order to legitimize speaking and listening, and achieve a genuine dialogue between individuals, even the most marginalized. Identity, which is as shifting as it is complex due to contexts and experiences, finds itself composing with her art in a touching symbiosis. Carla Adra feeds her work with discourse, but brings just as much into a human and sensitive experience.
Her work was awarded the Prix Prisme in 2017 and shown at the 15th Lyon Biennial, at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (Paris) and more recently at the Royal Theater Carré (Amsterdam) in collaboration with the Marina Abramovic Institut and at the Palais de Tokyo.
The performance
During a 5-week residency, Carla Adra and the Centre d’art will produce a video and sound work based on the reeanactment of the performance, Aire, in connection with the Lettres sans retour (Letters of no return) exhibited in the main hall of the Centre d’art.
This residency is divided into 4 phases.
Aire, 2017
5 performers, 15 min
The origin of Aire lies in a meditative walk practiced by Carla Adra in a Buddhist temple.
The five parquet players awaken the floor by making it sing. Squeaks, signs of wear and tear, are transformed into different musical notes, played by the performers’ bodily movements. Like percussionists, they are like musicians whose instrument is the floor they share. With their ears pressed to the ground, they are in a position to listen. Standing with their feet firmly planted, they talk to each other, expressing themselves with each other. The interior space of the architecture is the sounding board for this new instrument. Like the 10 Lettres sans retour sculptures concealed in the parquet floor, the performers enter into conversation through the floor of the space. Bordering on sculpture, this performance is inspired by the American Minimalist movement of the 60s and 70s, and in particular by Carl Andre and Robert Morris’s The sound of the bow of its own making (1961).
This practice was developed by Carla Adra during her time at ESAD in Reims, as part of a weekly workshop she ran for other art and design students, with the aim of transmitting performance and creating a climate of trust, listening and speaking among students, to counteract growing individualism and a stagnant competitive atmosphere.
Eté culturel 2023 – Jeunes ESTivants, a DRAC Grand Est initiative coordinated by Scènes & Territoires
Carla’s website
The short film “C’est à l’Est que le soleil se lève” (It’s in the East that the sun rises) about the Jeunes ESTivants residences of Cultural Summer 2023 in the Grand Est region of France.
https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Regions/DRAC-Grand-Est/actu/an/2024/Court-metrage-C-est-a-l-Est
