Bruissements patients
Curator of the 11ᵉ Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Melle
27/06 — 27/09/2026
https://www.biennale-melle.fr/
At Melle, the 11th Contemporary Art Biennial unfolds in dialogue with the arboretum that encircles the town. Like a silent score, the trees compose a landscape of slow-moving forces, invisible currents, and patient rustlings—a diffuse, calm yet persistent energy that runs through the entire event.
Bringing together works by around fifty artists, including some ten new works created especially for the occasion, the exhibition, which will take place from June to September 2026, explores the ambivalences of an agricultural world concerned with water, an element that has played an important role in Melle’s local history. The Biennial also resonates with a culture of living together, unconditional hospitality, resistance, and a situated, embodied, and open ecological thinking—values that characterize the town today.
The works of the participating artists, from a wide range of geographical and cultural backgrounds, will enter into dialogue with this specific context, making their individual experiences the starting point for a shared reflection.
Like a fable waiting patiently for an ear to come and listen to it, the exhibition approaches Melle as an “author-town.” The works on display will reveal the many narratives carried by the spaces they inhabit: from the Hôtel de Ménoc, a former courthouse, to the Romanesque churches and Protestant temple; from the arboretum to the former washhouses; and from the gardens to the public squares. It is this state of suspension that the event seeks to make perceptible, through places, but also through the involvement of local residents in the creation of certain works.
Bruissements patients (Patient Rustlings) asserts the particular strength and vitality of art: not as an immediate force, but as an ability to reconfigure the ways in which we see, inhabit, and imagine the world.
Jan Kopp
Artist and curator of the 2026 Biennial
Article : Françoise Lonardoni : Biennale d’art contemporain de Melle : de l’art comme résistance, 23 août 2026.
Poster : Jean-Claude Chianale
Bringing together works by around fifty artists, including some ten new works created especially for the occasion, the exhibition, which will take place from June to September 2026, explores the ambivalences of an agricultural world concerned with water, an element that has played an important role in Melle’s local history. The Biennial also resonates with a culture of living together, unconditional hospitality, resistance, and a situated, embodied, and open ecological thinking—values that characterize the town today.
The works of the participating artists, from a wide range of geographical and cultural backgrounds, will enter into dialogue with this specific context, making their individual experiences the starting point for a shared reflection.
Like a fable waiting patiently for an ear to come and listen to it, the exhibition approaches Melle as an “author-town.” The works on display will reveal the many narratives carried by the spaces they inhabit: from the Hôtel de Ménoc, a former courthouse, to the Romanesque churches and Protestant temple; from the arboretum to the former washhouses; and from the gardens to the public squares. It is this state of suspension that the event seeks to make perceptible, through places, but also through the involvement of local residents in the creation of certain works.
Bruissements patients (Patient Rustlings) asserts the particular strength and vitality of art: not as an immediate force, but as an ability to reconfigure the ways in which we see, inhabit, and imagine the world.
Jan Kopp
Artist and curator of the 2026 Biennial
Article : Françoise Lonardoni : Biennale d’art contemporain de Melle : de l’art comme résistance, 23 août 2026.
Poster : Jean-Claude Chianale