Laure Prouvost – MoMo 8 Flags

In 2023, after several stays in Monaco at the invitation of the NMNM, Laure Prouvost, who lives and works in Molenbeek (Belgium), proposed to establish an informal and sensitive correspondence between these two territories. MoMo (Monaco – Molenbeek) is a play on words, an imaginary space that thwarts borders to link energies and invent possibilities.

This spring, MoMo returns to the roof of Villa Paloma, where eight new flags designed by the artist are flying. With them, everyone is invited to take care of the living, to plant, water and pick. Installed while the Villa is closed between two exhibitions, the flags will also be displayed on June 5 in the Principality’s parks and gardens, where children from Monaco and Molenbeek will join in the singing. They will end their tour at 6pm on the Larvotto promenade at the Fondation Prince Albert II’s Green Shift Festival, where they will sing together a song of dreams and hope written by Laure Prouvost. The two choirs will then sail to the port of Marseille on June 7, where they will reprise their ritornello in association with Marseille children as part of the Artexplora festival, where the Foundation’s eponymous museum boat will be sporting sails designed by the artist.

In her films, frescoes and performances, Laure Prouvost brings people and plants together, creating joyful hybridizations where otherness generates new growth. She pursues these impulses through actions in the public space, through greening and awareness-raising campaigns that will soon, in Monaco as in Molenbeek, take the form of collective and festive moments where the public will be invited to become actors.

Laure Prouvost lives and works in Molenbeeck. In 2014, the NMNM presented her installation Wantee during the exhibition “Portraits d’intérieurs” and in 2021, on the occasion of the exhibition “Tremblements”, Since he’s gone, weaved by Grand Ma, a tapestry-video that is part of the museum’s collections. In 2022, she proposed Habiter, nager, leviter, méduser, a discussion performed on the terrace of the Villa Paloma with Mathilde Roman. In her work, which interlaces narratives and challenges the viewer, she performs with her body and her voice and provokes feelings of intimacy and proximity that thwart real distances. In her narratives, languages are linked, form new meanings, and imaginary projects are inspired by the contexts of the exhibitions. Her addition of personal fictions slowly unfold over time enhancing the narration as a whole.

MoMo
14.02 – 15.03.2023

Monaco-Molenbeeck: addressing signs, waving flags in the wind, linking sensibilities. The artist Laure Prouvost stretches her arms between territories and leads us on a journey that intertwines languages, fluidifies bodies and relationships. Drawing its strength from the wind that motions the flags, from the sea that opens the horizon and from the songs that unite the trajectories, the MoMo project arises on the roof of the Villa Paloma before travelling to the streets of Molenbeeck. Breasts are a recurring motif, echoing maternity and the vitality of sensations. In a distanced treatment of the real body, here they are fragmented, reversed, stretched and stylised. The flags also invite us to let ourselves be carried by the poetry of the texts, to exchange glances, to take part in the children’s songs that we will soon hear; carry dreams and desires, all the signs that we like to address each other regardless of borders and distances.

8 Flags

Since 2021, the “8 Flags” programme has invited artists to design flags for the roof of the Villa Paloma. Following Shimabuku, Pierre Bismuth and Nick Mauss, the NMNM has assigned Laure Prouvost to invest the eight flagpoles of the villa between two exhibitions. The temporary closure of the museum is an opportunity for a project to reconnect to the outside world, an informal correspondence between two territories which, at first glance, everything opposes and which the artist wishes to relate with flags, then a choir and parades.