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Marcel Dinahet – « retour de Fordlândia, Belem Object »
2 minMarcel Dinahet has visited the city of Fordlândia in Brazil with the Suspended Spaces collective on several occasions. Built in 1928 by Henry Ford on the banks of the Rio Tapajòs in the Amazon, this city was designed to enable intensive farming of the rubber required to manufacture tyres. The project failed and Fordlândia has become a small village, surrounded by the remains of its uncertain industrial heritage.
On the occasion of Marcel Dinahet's solo exhibition “Sous le vent” (“Downwind”) at the Brittany FRAC from 14th June to 10th November 2019, the artist is featuring the works he has produced in Fordlândia.
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2/10Retour de Fordlândia, by Marcel Dinahet
Today, Fordlândia is at once a landscape and an archive. The village juxtaposes American industrialist Henry Ford’s modern, rationalist, Western, colonial project and an Amazonian territory which creates and supports many different economic, environmental, anthropological and artistic, tourist and scientific projects.
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3/10Retour de Fordlândia, by Marcel Dinahet
Built to enable the intensive cultivation of rubber to equip the vehicles manufactured in Ford’s Detroit plants with tyres, the city of Fordlândia was also a “civilising” project, featuring factories, housing, a hospital and schools, all built in the American style. But it crumbled in a series of failures and mistakes; the water, the land, parasites and worker revolts got the best of the Fordian fantasy.
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4/10Retour de Fordlândia, by Marcel Dinahet
An industrial wasteland and a preserved fantasy, Fordlândia is a “suspended space” which contains stories which are unfinished or interrupted, sometimes violently, a space preoccupied with failed stories and stories of the future.
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5/10Night Arrival in Fordlândia, by Marcel Dinahet
The Suspended Spaces Collective arrives in Fordlândia at night opposite the rubber warehouse, the best-preserved building in the city. It is empty; Henry Ford had to abandon his project due to the impossibility of growing rubber trees under intensive agricultural conditions, because they need the space and variety of their natural environment in order to grow properly.
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6/10Filming the Factory, by Marcel Dinahet
An image from a presentation at La Tôlerie Art Centre in Clermont-Ferrand in November 2018 of the video "Filming the Factory", produced on the catwalk overlooking the floor of the Fordlândia factory.
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7/10Filming the Factory, by Marcel Dinahet
The "beautiful" idea foundered, not without violence, and today the traces of its failure, frozen in time, remain visible.
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8/10Retour de Fordlândia, by Marcel Dinahet
At the Brittany FRAC, a large-scale video installation which fills a room is on display. It features three quick-moving sequences of beach shots. The sequences on the centre screen were filmed on a beach along the Rio Tapajòs during a stopover on the way to Fordlândia.
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9/10Retour de Fordlândia, by Marcel Dinahet
Augustino is Fordlândia’s dowser. Marcel Dinahet is one too, and they were able to communicate through his dowsing rod about sensations and knowledge they share. Not long ago, the water of the Rio Tapajòs was clean enough to drink. This is no longer the case, and the inhabitants of Fordlândia are turning to Augustino for help finding drinking water sources where they can dig wells.
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The Institut français and the project
The project "Retour à Forlandia, Belem Object” received support from the Institut Français as part of its partnership with the Brittany region and with the City and Metropolis of Rennes.
The Institut français partners with local authorities to develop international artistic exchanges.