The diptych exhibition "DreamTime - Temps du rêve, grottes, art contemporain & transhistoire", presented simultaneously in the Mas-d'Azil cave in Ariège and at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, is the result of a singular adventure. The title, borrowed from the culture of the Australian aborigines, refers to their very special ability to 'dream' the world, that is to say, to conceive of it in mental, mythical and geophysical terms. This is why the Mas-d'Azil cave was initially envisaged as a matrix, a resource for reviewing our exchanges between psychic and physical spaces. This is also why, over the last three years, artists have been invited to interact with the cave's natural, historical and phantasmagorical dimensions. The exhibition resulting from this unique experiment is based on a play of mirrors between the two sites and the works created especially for the occasion. Within the cave, the artists have responded to the telluric forces, the energies of the imagination, and the exceptional archaeological heritage of Le Mas-d'Azil, linked to the emergence of art and the image. The exhibition at Les Abattoirs echoes and recontextualises this adventure in a geography recomposed from contemporary extrapolations inspired by the cave.
From one place to another, visitors are invited to practice a new network of transhistorical and transcultural passages. They are invited to invent their own bridges between natural and urban territories (from the cave to the city), across temporalities (from the art of prehistoric hunter-gatherers to contemporary creation), while overcoming cultural antagonisms (from immemorial Aboriginal art to our Western habits). As an exergue, this project also evokes one of the great challenges of our civilisation, that of anthropisation, or how to rethink man's action on his natural, material and psychic environment. Perhaps, for the time of a dream to be realised without too much delay, we can develop other 'geo-mental' configurations, inspired, of course, by the Aboriginal 'Dreamtime'. Curator: Pascal Pique, in collaboration with Nathalie Thibat and Claus Sauer