Transversal and documentary practices and poetics
Alejandra Riera has been living in France since 1989. She taught cinema and documentary practices at ENSA Bourges for 11 years before joining ENSAPC. Her attempts and research summon images and writings, film-documents and drawings, impelling the realization of a poetics of situated gestures. “Between the fields”, these gestures summon diverse knowledge questioning our ways of reading history and geography. Attentive to the capacity of the plastic arts to summon the senses and passionate about the silent-speaking world of plant writing and the worlds they open, she has accompanied her attempts since 2014, by a thinking and doing with places, the environment, which progresses in a less self-centered perspective than in the human creations and activities only.
Her work has been the subject of numerous presentations (Documenta11 in 2002, retrospective exhibition at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona in 2004-2005, Documenta12 in 2007), as well as outside spaces specifically dedicated to the exhibition of artistic production. Since 2017 she has been preparing “Jardin de las Mixturas” at the Reina Sofia Museum.
Her attempts have most often promoted collective thinking, gestures and writings. Among others, she has initiated and carried collectively and pedagogically with students and teachers since 2016 the transformation of the courtyard of honor of the art school of Bourges – a parking for more than 40 years-, into a courtyard-garden and that of the backyard, into a place of consideration, study and regard for the spontaneous plant diversity.
