Far from the diktats of art history and labels, Annlor Codina wants to preserve all the subversion she puts at the service of social values. Interested in the relationship between the work and the public, she makes her installations accessible and interactive.
She is an artist who draws inspiration from contemporary violent social events to decontextualize violence and lead us to see it through a different lens. Starting from the premise that cinema and media have succeeded in making violence seductive — as in the reported images of the Gulf War or in Tarantino’s films, for example — she seeks to draw something else out of this violence. Tension and horror can take on an aesthetic and festive dimension. Annlor starts from an idea, an event, and takes the time to research it in order to better understand it. She is now trying to integrate open source into her installations, to bring to life this alternative that aligns with her values and with the perspective of knowledge-sharing tied to this system. Beyond open source, she seeks to give life to data that gains its own independence and becomes autonomous from the artist, who then becomes, in part, a spectator of her own creation. Annlor Codina enjoys working on installations that bring together different fields, some of which she does not master herself — this drives encounters and collaborations. The artist’s evolution is intimately tied to current events; we can note that she is currently interested in violence linked to immigration.
Based in Toulouse for two years, she settled there to remain part of the artists’ collective Mix’Art Myrys. This structure allows her to occupy a studio under very good conditions. She stays close to artists and members with specialties different from her own, which allows for interesting collaborations and experiments that would not necessarily be easy under other conditions. For her, Mix’Art Myrys is a bit like a family, where mutual aid and collective work are continuous and fruitful.
Her installation « Pursuit » was presented at the event celebrating Mix’Art Myrys’s 20th anniversary. It is a broken-down, smoking Peugeot 504, fitted with a video projector and a Raspberry Pi that projects onto the hood a short film retracing the pursuit of a car with helium balloons attached to it. This car travels between the different sites occupied by the Mix’Art Myrys collective during its years of illegal occupation, up to its legalization at Ferdinand Lassalle, and up to the Cartoucheries. This place represented the hopes of a happy relocation, which ultimately could not happen. The installation is adorned with « 20 » balloons and a garland of burst balloons. The 20kg of confetti placed in the back of the car are a clear invitation to interact with the work, encouraging celebration. It is a kind of low-cost, DIY party, where the joy of having reached this anniversary date does not overshadow the fear that it might be the last. Culture is not thriving at a time when the State is cutting budgets and exhibition spaces are partly dependent on the political choices of city councils. This pursuit of an ideal — that of the collective, of democratized art, of « art or death » (Mix’Art Myrys’s slogan) — may take detours, may run into failures, but it must exist.
Pursuit is all of this, and much more.
Portrait – Marion Cazaux, intern at Mix’Art Myrys, 2015.