Espace d’Art Contemporain Les Thermes+
Résidences d’Artistes
4, Place des Bains, 52400 Bourbonne-les-Bains, France
Contact: eaclesthermes@outlook.com or by facebook.
EAC LesThermes became a place of sowing, sprouting and harvesting fortuitously.
It was created as a place of questionning, research, connection, exchange and creation.
It is about to find new ways of artistic exchange in a time when art has become like a bank safe. (Or has it been already since a very long time, looking at art having been sponsored by kings and popes, churches might function like bank safes)
Not much alive anymore, like a gated zone, where life becomes shallow and boring to hell.
EAC Les Thermes aims to transform barriers between different ways of life in something more translucide and softer, easier to criss cross .
Talking about barriers of class, colour, culture.
The initiator and owner, Daniela, thought about buying a very spacious and low priced house, as her holiday home, because she is afraid of not being able to afford age after pension in Switzerland, where she raised her 2 daughters alone.
A Bourbonne taxidriver told her to come and stir up the place a bit.
That is how she found this treasure of a house by searching in the net.
At the start she wished to bring friends with her, but when she realized that they had their own plans, she figured out that it would be best to plan and build it all by herself and later on nicely invite fellow artists and researchers to develope ideas together and exchange with and integrate the local population as much as possible.
The experience of a now already pretty long life has showed her how many similartities all peoples around the world share and she is very fond of finding out about many more secrets and is continouisly hunting and studying them.
Many years of talking with psychiatrists and psychologists ( because of her own disorderly soul) and of reading and listening to stories in many countries of the world, with many women, men and children, have helped her finding out about how understanding and healing can work. Her path of looking for hidden truths and shamefull secrets is not all simple, because people or societies naturally do not want to show the hidden parts of the ones displayed gloriously in the limelight.
Wounds normally heal faster in the air and the daylight, might they be on the body or on the soul.
It can be an act of transgression and an important part of healing.
Daniela finds out slowly what a treasure of mythology and history, landscape and geography Bourbonne is, it displays each day more wonders.
The artists in residency bring their own riches as gifted seeds with them and help Daniela to connect to the world, to connect the worlds. They gently become her ambassadors, because she herself is rather shy and without the fellow artists help would therefore risk to fail her aim.