In spring 2017, as Le Havre marks its 500th anniversary, visual artists, designers, graphic artists, stage directors, novelists, will follow in the wake of Niemeyer and Monet to reinterpret this surprising city, to reveal it to Europe… and perhaps even to itself. When you arrive in the city, on the Volcan Theater side, you enter an open-air monument with Porte Océane located at the bottom end; here the beach is frequented by easy-going bathers looking at the horizon as the biggest container ships in the world go by. Le Havre is a series of strange images like this. It is a photogenic city that seduces artists as soon as they set foot here. They are won over by its light - which has become a cliché - but above all, by its atmosphere, which the works of art on offer will be tasked with revealing. How do you recreate an atmosphere, reproduce the depth of a city, through artistic gestures that endeavor to make it dance. Le Havre was rebuilt in the 1950s by architect Auguste Perret and his workshop, and was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2005. It clearly deserves to become one of the most desirable urban tourism destinations in France. Yet the city needs to be understood, to be loved, to be put on stage, and we need to identify the people that give it all their energy and their talent, we need to be bold, but fair, with the city, to bring out all its strangeness and its evident poetry.
Jean BLAISE, Artistic director
