Unearthing the Collection : American narratives

The Fondation Cartier and Columbia Global Centers | Paris are please to present Unearthing the Collection: American Narratives.

Join Senior Curator Leanne Sacramone and embark on a journey through the soundscapes, skyscapes, and landscapes of American artists from the collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

The first event in the series will be a screening of Bernie Krause, A Life with the Great Animal Orchestra (2021) followed by a conversation with writer and director Vincent Tricon.

About the film

Bernie Krause, A Life with The Great Animal Orchestra was produced by Fondation Cartier and is the first documentary by French filmmaker Vincent Tricon. Composed of unpublished archival footage and interviews filmed in California in 2021, A Life follows Krause through Sonoma County, where he lives with his wife Katherine. Snippets of Krause’s collected soundscapes examined in the film reveal that within any ecosystem, each species has its own acoustic niche and human activities are increasingly silencing these great animal orchestras. Part of the problem, notes Krause, is the increased alienation of human beings from the environment. Quoting American environmentalist Paul Shepard Jr., Krause states, “The further we draw away from the natural world, the more pathological we become as a culture,” adding with a smirk, “And, if you don’t believe that, watch the news.”

Speakers

Vincent Tricon is a French editor and film director who studied in the editing department at La Fémis, the French grande école. He served as film editor for Divines (2016) and Jessica Forever (2018). In 2017, he was nominated at The César Awards, France’s national film awards, for Divines (2016), directed by Houda Benyamina (The Golden Camera at Cannes Film Festival 2016). His fourth short narrative feature film, Sami la Fugue, was produced by Barney Productions in 2021. Bernie Krause, A Life with The Great Animal Orchestra is his first documentary.

Leanne Sacramone is currently Senior Curator at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. She joined the staff at the Fondation Cartier in 2001 and has since organized close to twenty exhibitions. She has notably contributed to making known on the French art scene the history of graffiti in Born in the Streets: Graffiti (2009), the art of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Beauté Congo-Congo Kitoko (2016) and the work of Latin American photographers in America Latina (2013). Leanne values the wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary programming of the Fondation Cartier, which has led her to collaborate with painters and sculptors, photographers, designers, comic strip artists, and thinkers. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, she has been based in Paris since 1992. She studied French Language and Literature at Smith College and Art History at the Ecole du Louvre and the Université Paris I Sorbonne.