PURPLE STREET PANTONE, #45 communes > Geneva (CH), Antigel festival 2016

In February 2016 the Antigel festival in Geneva programmed a photo exhibition documenting 45 installations of Purple Street Pantone, from the color of the festival’s logo (Pantone 2065 C), made in each 45 communes of the Canton of Geneva during 20 days of January.

Antigel Festival archives: http://archives.antigel.ch/2016/spectacle/exposition-gilles-viandier/

Maps of Geneva’s Canton

In the shared space of the city, Purple Street Pantone transforms the ephemeral life of a place as it plays with architecture, light, wind, symbols, questioning the boundaries of public territory. Influencing the pace of passers-by, it encourages people to look at the city differently, creating a singular response for each space, a constructive gesture, an image modified by movement, an invitation to meet and to move along in a sort of dance.

Like the Antigel festival, who finds unusual sites in the canton of Geneva, or experienced from another angle to infuse them with a new spirit through concert and performance, a dancer crosses the territory with his camera and his oblong and elastic fabric, which also becomes a reoccurring character as in a comic strip, travelling through the story of visiting the selected sites of all 45 communes.

A nomadic and dynamic purple vector temporarily installed on the scale : 1 model of the city, between the blue of Lake Geneva and the red of “Poésie”, criss-crossing the Arve and Rhône rivers, between the vines of winter, under the rain or the sky’s folds, passing from village to city, drawing with buildings, Purple Street Pantone reflects by its urban couture the incredible geographical diversity of the canton, introduces the artifact to defy artifice, transforms reality like a brush, lets it touch its undulating dress, and touches our common ground, makes itself permeable to situations, travels as one could dance, invents scores, rhythms and states of the day. Thus brought together by the photographic exhibition, these multiple installations offer a subjective panorama that also testifies to our urgency to get out of the imposed frameworks and the creeping privatization of the territory.

On February 8. a performance welcomed the opening of the exhibition at the gallery Le Boléro in Versoix (CH).