Laure Prouvost in Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois ce bleu profond te fondre: LAM, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France

At the invitation of the LaM, Laure Prouvost looks at a museum that marked her childhood and adolescence. French by her northern origins, British by her artistic training in London, Belgian by her studio in Antwerp, Laure Prouvost is an international artist who has always developed a pronounced taste for the poetry of languages, mixtures and crossbreeding. Conjuring up a familiar universe, the artist transforms it into a dreamlike and fantastical space in a surrealist spirit, where reality and fiction intertwine.

Deep See Blue Surrounding You, the title of her installation for the French Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, revolves around a video that invites us on an initiatory road trip between Nanterre, Grigny, Roubaix, the slag heaps of the Pas-de-Calais mining basin, the Facteur Cheval's Ideal Palace in Hauterives, Marseille and Venice. Carried by a dozen characters of different backgrounds, languages and ages, each expressing a specific performative skill (dance, magic, music, poetry, etc.), this epic, both tangible and imaginary, offers a poetic portrait of France's outsiders and, at the same time, questions the possibility of representing a fluid and globalized world.

The octopus appears as the symbol of these shifting and polymorphous exchanges.