Jours Ouvrables de Laida Lertxundi

Laida Lertxundi is a Basque-born artist and filmmaker who lived and worked in Los Angeles for 16 years. Today she is a professor at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, and she lives and works in Paris.

Laida Lertxundi's artistic approach, distinguished by a careful practice of moving image and, more recently, drawing, develops an explicit language based on an exploration that combines conceptual rigour and sensuality. Her films thus draw parallels between landscape and the body as experience.

Her practice, collaborative in nature, stages improvised gestures and spontaneous collective activities, and engages with the landscape both as an artistic tradition and as a particular set of human-centred ways of seeing. The construction of this repertoire of images opens onto a cinematic dimension in which visual materials activate collective memories, even a shared artistic unconscious. Her attachment to the simplicity of gestures echoes what we are trying to achieve at the art centre, namely to initiate links between contemporary art and care. Very attentive to these thoughts in motion, Laida Lertxundi's protocols set out to create a resolutely intuitive visual aesthetic. She reveals an artistic rigour and a profound sense of otherness.

Welcoming Laida Lertxundi to the contemporary art centre means giving ourselves time to revisit our relationship with cinema, so dear to the centre's programming. This first exhibition by the artist on French soil favours committed transmission through an aesthetic approach founded on encounter and gentleness.

Laida Lertxundi allows us to envisage a gradual, concerted construction through the implementation of a set of reflections and tools designed to support her research and production in France. The contemporary art centre, in this area of the central Pyrenees, inscri