From September to December, the French capital will be an immense culture capital where visual arts, theatre, dance, music and film will become huge waves that will fall upon locals and tourists. The 40th Edition of the Paris Autumn Festival will begin in a few days.

Organized in collaboration with the French Culture and Communication Ministry, the festival manages to gather, every year, around 100,000 visitors from around the world in the more than 40 events that show France’s multifaceted skills in never-ending artistic expressions, while they mix with the active participation of the artists, thinkers and filmmakers from every corner of the planet. This wide range of eclectic shows try to enrich and educate those who assist in terms of cultural and artistic diversity.

This festival, which celebrates the most creative expressions of contemporary art, was founded in 1972 by Michel Guy in collaboration with the President of the French Republic of that time, Georges Pompidou. With its foundation, this artistic festival incorporated two current events: Semaines Musicales Interntationales and the International Dance Festival.

All the activities of this great event will take place in different iconic places in Paris, including the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, the Théâtre National de Chaillot, the Opéra Comique and the Centre Pompidou, among others. The visitors to the events will be able to see performances and films in French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Russian, with French subtitiles.

Among the most outstanding events during the month of September is the visual artwork Modernization by the artist Hema Upadhyay from India, in which she evokes the contemporary mutations in India and the immigration matter. The cities that are shown in her work contrast with the organic development in Mumbai. A labyrinth of colours that reveals deep social inequalities. This work will be presented from September 17th until October 30th in the Espace Topographie de l’Art. Free entry.

Lloyd Newson will be present with his choreography ‘Can We Talk About This?’ in which he mixes different forms of dance to criticise the ‘taboos’ of our society. To what point can one talk about subjects like religion, multiculturalism and racism? This work opens a space for the debate on censorship. It will be presented from September 28th until October 6th in the Théâtre de la Ville. Entry is 29€.

To see the full programme visit: http://www.festival-automne.com/home.html

Hans

So if you’re enjoying your holidays in apartments in Paris don’t miss out the Autumn Festival, an experience that you don’t want to hear about from someone else.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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Fate was to take Amy Winehouse on the 23rd of July this year, in the midst of a week of devastating global events after the massacres in Norway.
She was found in her flat in Camden Town, the well-known London neighbourhood.

Amy Winehouse leaves behind a short but intense life – the life of a classic diva in many ways, in which she was forced to deal with an extreme level of fame and a brief, though highly successful singing career. Amy was just as famous for her personal sense of style as her two records, Frank and Back to Black, both impressive soul-inflected works which brought her worldwide success, and won her five out 6 nominated Grammys – though she unable to attend the ceremony because of visa problems, a result of her well-documented problems with substance abuse.

Her known drug-related incidents, her run-ins with the law, changing appearance and mental stability placed her on the front page of the tabloid press many times, who made a kind of circus of her life, rather than her music.

Various efforts were made on the part of family, friends, and Amy herself to get off the drugs, and ridded of her bad habits, and she voluntarily entered a number of rehabilitation centres.

The causes of her death are yet to be confirmed. Her family, in statements made to the press, suspect that her fragile body hadn’t been able to cope with her return to alcohol, which Winehouse had been attempting to quit. The mystery only seems to confirm the air of doomed fate which Amy had been dogged by through life, something which the press has been quick to pick up on.

Amy, as it has been quickly pointed out, now belongs to the group known as the 27 club – which has not had a new “member” since the death of Kurt Cobain.

The club is made up of highly influential musicians who all share the fact that they did not make it past their 27th birthday, having lived lives of excess and emotional instability – living fast and dying young.

Blues musician Robert Johnson is considered by most the first member of the group – like the founding, honorary leader of the club.

Other members of the 27 club include Brian Jones, guitarist with the Rolling Stones, who died in a swimming pool; Jimi Hendrix who died choking on his own vomit as he slept, the result of a heady combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.

The singer Janis Joplin was found dead after a suspected heroin overdose, though the exact causes of her death never came to light. Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors was found dead in his Paris apartment after suspected heart failure, though an autopsy was never carried out. Kurt Cobain committed suicide by shooting himself.

Though these are one main ones on the list, there are many more, less internationally known artists and figures whose lives and promising careers have been cut short.

Ara

In Paris you can visit a place of pilgrimage; the resting place of one of the most famous members of the 27 club; the grave of Jim Morrison, which is in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. If you visit and rent apartments in Paris you can pay a special visit to this famed cemetery, and pay your respects to some of the other iconic graves which lie there.

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Translated by: Poppy
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Shiny and bright, educated and cultured, elegant and charming, unique and cosmopolitan, Paris never disappoints and  is always ready to offer something else, something new, different, or unknown. Some will not leave its stunning museums which offer the best that man has created throughout its history, there are those who prefer its endless avenues lined with shops or others who succumb to its nightly entertainment offering. All of these travelers find their particular Paris, because Paris is for everyone, even for those who seek life in books. For those who are inevitably influenced by this worldview, Paris awaits them in their literary cafes.

If the traveler wants to leave his imprint he can, everyone who ever wanted to leave a mark in art, literature or philosophy had to pass through Paris. There they found the most conducive environments for any type of creation and this is (and was) because at this place of the world (not taking into account the inherent problems of the destructive ego of some geniuses)they felt better than at home and in communion with other peers.

With each new wave of creators different neighborhoods gained popularity. Initially, four were the bohemian streets to gain, over time, elegance and style giving its inhabitants a rich success and, therefore, a better-off economic situation, in the late nineteenth century it was Montmartre,  the place chosen by the Impressionists. On the other hand, Au Lapin Agile, close to Sacre-Cour, united the last of the damned along with the heat of ethyl alcohol vapors, every night there ended in anger, frustration and fighting. Without relinquishing the magical aura which has permeated today, you can comfortably  dine while enjoying a show at very reasonable prices.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Montmartre, without losing the artistic nature that still is preserved,  becomes the residence of renowned writers like Zola and Renoir. Parallel to this transformation, artists were coming to Paris from every corner of the world and were living under very poor economical condition and sometime in cases of a extreme lack of hygiene, in Montparnasse. Modigliani, Braque and Picasso filled their ateliers with the works that now flood the museums, while writers such as Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald ended up finishing off some of their  texts in the tables of the Closerie des Lilas (on the Boulevard Montparnasse). Today the neighborhood is a more elegant one, where restaurant, piano bar and brasserie are abundant

Saint Germain de Prés, after the Second World War, begins to be the epicenter of the European intellectuality. Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and the members of the Nouvelle Vague are to be seen at the tables of Les Deux Magots or the Café de Flore, where this generation  so ideologically committed to discussing just about anything spend most of the day at it. The premises remain open and mix a select international clientele that blends with politicians who frequent the nearby Lipp Brasserie and Le Procop  coffee, advertised as Europe’s oldest (open since 1686) and whose walls have received all the actors from the nearby Comédie Française.

Candela Vizcaíno

We must live the experience. Leave one of the great apartments in Paris grab a seat in one of these cafes, and who knows? Start your own path as an artist.

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Translated by: Marc
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Between the 14th of September and the 6th of November, the photographic work of French artist Sarah Ritter will be on show at the Photographique d’ile Centre. The exhibition is a collection of work based on various different themes – from simple inanimate objects to her works on migration.

Sarah Ritter was born in 1978 and lived in the city of Lyon. She studied photography at the National Superior School of Photography of Arles, graduating in 2008. However what her photography illustrates is more than just technique – it is that virtue which some artists have to depict moments in which all the elements seem to harmonise together to create the singular image; she has an eye for capturing the truly unique composition.

Ritter forms part of a new generation of visual artists working in photography which is not afraid of the results, or of playing with and manipulating different landscapes and objects, sometimes not even expecting anything extraordinary, but always creating a work with strong, confident artistic stamp even with the simplest of subjects.

Her work with the image for this exhibition is based in a limited space between the portrait, which places emphasis on the posture and situation of the subject than the face which is transformed into an element more than just its composition. The same is true of her portraits, where the physical elements are complements to a portrait which Ritter wants to offer. It would seem them that her objective is not concerned with observing the exterior world – she is not interested in the actual landscape or face, but in using them instead as components of a more complex narrative, where photography is transformed into a kind of fiction.

Ritter’s work makes reference back to the time when photography was transforming from a technical mechanism into a form of art – since historically, the bourgeoise had used art as a from of social mobility and ascension; gaining prestige by getting great artists to immortalise them in painted portraits with painting in particular. Soon after, it was established that photography could also fill this role – to immortalise moments and situations, and even overtake the painted portrait.

This is how photography came to replace other expressions of art – which have become more conceptual over the years, with the work distancing itself from the descriptive in order to position itself in an idea or concept, which becomes the centre of the work’s production and composition.

In the midst of these theories is the photography of Sarah Ritter, who is not interested in the object of photography, but the significant of the object, and attempts to use it to create a visual narrative in her work.

For more information  http://www.cpif.net/index.php?rub=1&docId=217237

Nancy Guzman

It is always a pleasure spending a few days in apartments in Paris but autumn is an extra special time to visit the city, take some time to see some exhibitions, eat in good restaurants, and wander the streets of Montmartre remembering all the old artists who used to hang out there.

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Translated by: Poppy
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France is a country that has always been at the forefront of every kind of human rights. We would lose a lot of time making a list of all the French philosophers and activists have undoubtedly marked the twentieth century political thought. Today, the disastrous policies from people like Sarkozy, and the panic generated by the migration in France, just like last year when ninety Gypsies were deported to Romania, causing dissatisfaction in this serious situation. These are surely the days of horror to migration, the configuration of new subjects and individuals; justification, everywhere, no longer appear to be the economic crisis, but have little to do with migration problem comes from bad economics, abuse of power by governments, corporations, and banks continue to earn more money while unemployment and hunger is on the streets. However, people are already mobilizing.

Groups like Anonymous have come to the net to claim the rights of people from online activism, as well as from some websites and individuals. Anonymous goes beyond pretending to be an abstract and extended activism by social networks, or scrolling information or trends in the network, it is perhaps a proposal for comprehensive whole, without political principles or parties, but rather seeking the public’s reaction and Internet users from around the world.

France is the country that best has used the word “Revolution”; we know by heart that part of the history. If we step back just a little bit to see what happened, we would cite the mythical May 68, which has a very remarkable influence on both, the social protest movements and the 15M in Spain. What happened to all that great spirit of change? Where is it? There is a newspaper that is still valid though, and that has kept this spirit until now or at least, the one, which is aware of all the political events that are currently happening. This newspaper is called L’Humanité, it seeks to be a credible alternative space in the service of social transformation. Likewise the website of L’Humanité is intended to be a resource center for militant action, open to new and traditional media. Likewise L’Humanité organizes a festival of music and art, which is just the best, from the 16^th to the 18^th of September. Among those who will be part of the festival participate are: Joan Baez, Yannick Noah, Sum 41, Bernard Lavilliers, The Ting Tings, Gaëtan Roussel, Patrice, Nolwenn Leroy, Soprano and Fat Freddy’s Drop, among others. For more information and tickets, visit: http://humanite.fr/fete_huma

Alexa Ray

Nothing better than getting apartments in Paris and enjoying this festival. Come and join while working with L’Humanite, a newspaper worth to read. Change is everyone’s responsibility.

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Translated by: Hans
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From the 12^th of September to the 11^th of November, Quaibranly Museum exhibits the third biennial non-Western image, Photoquai 2011; this version brings together 400 works by 46 contemporary photographers representing 29 countries.

The Biennial of the world images is directed by Françoise Huguier, who invites us to discover new works through which it is possible to come closer to take a look at the world and the various situations presented. As part of the biennial, there will be panel discussions, slide shows, interesting lectures and presentations of lectures by photographers, curators and specialists in images.

The selection of participants was the product of a careful research, in which specialists traveled to the designated countries to study the emerging trends of local photography as well as the photographers experience to choose the best representation for the biennial.

The areas of the world represented in this exhibition are: Latin America, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, North Africa, Caribbean, Russia, Belarus and Middle East.

These areas were chosen because of their related working conditions for photography, as well as the difficult environmental, social and political conditions that force photographers to use creativity in the process.

Magagane Mack is a South African photographer, whose work aims to visually explore the urban spaces in Johannesburg. He shows people separated by boundaries in small spaces within a densely populated environment. His photographs are composed by images with the ability to capture certain angles that the glance cannot be seen.

Photo CIA is a Brazilian collective of photographers formed in 2003, which is headquartered in Sao Paulo. These are just three photographers who compose it, and their works are always signed collectively.

The Colombian photographer Julian Lineros works with photojournalism, from which the image replaces the words in the controversial and violent reality of his country through his works, he has included research papers denouncing the recruitment of children from paramilitary groups in the Uraba area in northwestern Colombia.

The Belarusian photographer Andrei Liankevich studied at the World Press Photo seminary in Yerevan. He is a photojournalism professor of the European Humanity University in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is part of group of young photographers called SPUTNIK and their works have been published in various international media, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Le Figaro, Die Zeit, Vanity Fair, Der Spiegel, among others.

Camille Zakharia was born in 1962 in Lebanon; he uses his camera to document aspects of everyday life. Through photomontage and collage he organizes images that go beyond photography. He has participated in the Venice Biennale and at major exhibition of his work.

For more information http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/expositions/prochainement/photoquai-2011.html

Nancy Guzman

I invite you to rent apartments in Paris and go through this exhibition that brings the best works of international photography, through them you can take a look at the world beyond any language or cultural barrier.

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Translated by: Hans
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What is Shakespeare and Company? Why is it so famous? What makes it so special that everyone talks about it? It’s hard to explain what is Shakespeare and Co and its history linked with literature geniuses, war, multiple stores and two people with the same obsessions: books and Paris. In essence, Shakespeare and Co is a library with old and new traditions; it is a book dealer that sells books, mainly in English, but without excluding other languages. It is a useful bookstore, is a myth of words with a long history behind.

Let’s start with the past. The current bookstore is located in the Latin Quarter near the Seine; at 37 rue de la Bûcherie. It is there since 1951 and looks like it will remain at the same location for long. Its founder and owner, George Whitman, who has nothing to do with the poet, but a lot with poetry, is an almost century-old American who started the bookstore with the idea of selling second hand books, after Second World War, to get a little money for the mountains of books that he had accumulated in his bohemian apartment during years.

So far, this is nothing different from any other old bookseller. However, Whitman named his bookstore initially Le Mistral, and then changed its name to Shakespeare and Co, in honor of another legendary bookstore closed in 1941, because its owner Sylvia Beach refused to sell a copy of Joyce to a German officer (remember, this is the Nazi occupation time). So what? readers might wonder. Well, Sylvia Beach was not only a merchant, in her bookstore, which was like her home, she constantly met with the most important intellectuals of the time: Eliot, Gide, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. She also dared to publish Joyce’s Ulysses when no one gave a penny for the writer. The original Shakespeare and Co. was located on the rue de l’Odéon (and previously at the Rue Dupuytren). People could talk, read for free, leave used books and do concerts in this cozy bookstore.

In the early 50′s, the bohemian Whitman took the name Shakespeare and Co and placed his bookstore in the Latin Quarter with the same philosophy as the one owned by Sylvia Beach. Burroughs, Miller, Sartre, Beauvoir, Breton and Kerouac then frequented the bookstore. Also, there were no weeks that he didn’t have recitals (advertised on the notice board, mirror on the webpage), people talk, people comment, there are unpaid jobs for students who want to exchange a few hours of work, for the right of staying (in a sleeping bag) in the upstairs rooms. To feed the myth, each book sold from the bookstore’s crowded shelves has a stamp that says “Shakespeare and Co Kilomètre Zero Paris”. It is not the most wonderful thing in the world, but for the bibliophile mythomaniacs, it is very close.

Candela Vizcaíno

The myth began with two apartments in Paris full of books. Then followed the store, friends, etc…

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Translated by: Hans
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Electronic music is today what’s consumed the most and what a large part of the public has known to access during the years. That’s how a large part of modern commercial music depends on the resources of electronic music to reanimate the spirit of pop and the dancefloors. It’s like imagining a Lady Gaga song without a chorus, or the sound of a synth, or a rhythm box, or processed or digitalized guitars. Electronic music has many predecessors around the mid-20th century. It’s a sure thing that the first experimentations with synthesizers took place around the 40s and 50s in horror films’ and space invaders soundtracks. Of course, a master like the great Joe Meek would capture the spirit of the new technology to create masterpieces like ‘I Hear a New World’, by his band The Blue Men. A special mention goes to John Cage and Stockhausen, also the fathers of electronic music.

Without doubt, techno was radically influenced by German Krautrock, one of its origins. Bands like Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel used electronica to make a substantial leap to the emptiness of psychedelia and space rock. The direct fathers of techno were the fabulous Kraftwerk, that with excellent albums such as ‘Trans Europa Express’, ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Die Menschmachine’ defined the use of electronica in pop music, which would also be explored by David Bowie and Brian Eno especially. The electro rhythm of techno, of repetition and minimalism, has without doubt a lot to do with the experiments of Throbbing Gristle and Neubaten around the end of the 70s and the 80s. Some say that techno comes from Detroit, Michigan, from the mid-80s.

The electro parades that take place in Europe are generally full of parties, people looking for new emotions or new friends. Paris is a city that, generally, when you imagine it, you can’t believe that thousands of people go crazy and invade the streets, making of the city a frenetic party to the rhythm of the modern beats of world electronica. And it’s because the electronica genre is never ending and it continues in a perpetual evolution. If you go to this parade, as always, it’s advisable to take comfortable shoes and the best of attitudes. If the most hardcore techno isn’t your thing, this festival is not for you. If what you’re looking for is strong emotions and you’re a fan of electronica, this is totally for you.

Techno Parade in Paris presents the best in house, trance, techno and drum n bass, with over twenty allegoric lorries with the best DJs in France and Europe. The streets of Paris will fill up with a crowd craving dance, electronica, romance and adventures. On that night, Paris will definitely be full of clubs open for after-party madness. For more information on the Techno Parade 2011 visit the webpage: http://www.technoparade.fr/

Alexa Ray

Nothing better than getting apartments in Paris and living this party that, surely, will make you change your concept of traditional Paris.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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From the 8^th to 17^th of September, the Théâtre National de Chaillot features In Paris, the new Performance by Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. This show impresses with its original work, in which dance, video and music come together in one act. Its original aesthetic proposal immerses dancing in a field that has been explored little in the past, which is the union between various artistic disciplines to give life to a dance, which is closer to performance.

The show is produced by Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dmitry Krymov Laboratory, the Russian association of the Century Foundation and the important contribution of Korjaamo Theatre from Helsinki.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov was born in Riga, Latvia in the former Soviet Union in 1948. Baryshnikov’s parents, an engineer and a seamstress ballet lover, enrolled him at the School of Ballet Opera House in Riga when he was only 11. Parallel to the ballet, he also took piano and French classes but at the end he chose ballet as a profession and made it to a great academy, which is the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Leningrad, where he was accepted in 1963. There was a straight line from this point to his fame. His teacher, the great Alexander Pushkin, who had cast the same unparalleled movements of Rudolf Nureyev, took him to the top scene of Soviet ballet.

In 1974, during his tour in Canada, he called for political asylum. After a short time in Canada, he finally settled down in the United States, where he joined the American Ballet Theatre. After working with the New York City Ballet and other companies, in the 90´s he began working in the film industry and launched his own dance clothing line as well as a perfume line.

In Paris is based on the texts written in 1940 by Ivan Bunin about the casual encounter between a woman and an old White Russian Army general in the city of Paris before the Second World War. Both were immigrants, transplanted to a reality that cannot adapt to their world, a situation that is lessened by the meeting and the love that rages between these two characters. Loneliness and the drifting feeling of living reemerge when death separates them.

Ivan Alexeevich Bunin was born into a wealthy family of central Russia, he learned to read and write with the masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. During his first writing stage, he wrote poetry, while translating works by American writers from English into Russian. After the October Revolution, he was exiled in Paris, where he began to spend his time writing about his critical look at the revolution, which finally inspired him to write Cursed Days, book that received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933.

In Paris is an attractive performance that asks for our attendance, especially because, this is a show created by one of the most important Ballet dancers and choreographers of the twentieth century.

For more information http://theatre-chaillot.fr/danse/in-paris

Nancy Guzman

So if you are a Ballet lover, I suggest you to rent apartments in Paris and come to the Théâtre National de Chaillot to see this show that reflects the ongoing movement of art.

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Translated by: Hans
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The Pompidou Centre in Paris is showing the photographic and filmic work of Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi. The exhibition is made up of a number of photographs, unedited films, and will be on until the 12th of september.

The Pompidou Centre aims to highlight the process of transformation which Brancusi creates in his work, following the footsteps of Gan Ray, the godfather of New York Dada who started to made experimental works when he funded the Société Anonyme where he organised and compiled all the works of the vanguard – including cinema and photography, influencing scores of artists with its theories on photography as art.

Constantin Brâncu?i (which is how the name is written in Romanian) was born in Pestisani, Romania in 1876. The child of a poor peasant family, he was expected to do harsh chores and jobs from a young age. At nine, he started to work for a wood manufacturing company, which led to an interest in artisanship – an interest which would develop into art, thanks to a patron who funded his studies at art school. Later, he moved to Bucharest to study at the National School of Fine Art, where he specialised in sculpture, and then later further in Vienna.

Brancusi moved to Paris at the start of 1900, and lived through hardship and hunger in the early stages. By the close of the First World War, he had started to make a name for himself, establishing himself as one of the most relevant sculptors on the global scene.

Though his early work is highly influenced by expressionism, particularly the work of Rodin, he soon moved to sculpture more connected to cubism, and the conceptualism of the abstract as a form of artistic signature – this is what distinguishes his from other artists and makes him unique.

For Brancusi, sculpture had to intervene, invade space with huge scale construction. His perfectionism in the way he worked can be seen in photographs of his workshops, where he placed the models exactly where they could be seen. He was a tireless craftsman of stone, marble, bronze and wood.

The book “Brancusi and Photography” by Elizabeth A. Brown from the University Art Museum at the University of California shows the artist’s workshop, and his perfectionism, through the photographs which he took himself of his works, and which are in black and white.

He took many trips to the United States, where he held a number of successful personal exhibitions. In 1937, he returned to Romania, and made the famous Endless Column, over 30m high, for the public park of Tirgu Jiu. He also travelled to India to work on the Temple of Meditation, as commissioned by the maharajah Mademoiselle Pogany.

For more information http://www.centrepompidou.fr/pompidou/manifs.nsf/allexpositions/83720c68df23a65dc125782400345513?opendocument&sessionm=2.2.1&l=1&form=actualite

Nancy Guzman

You can catch his work at the wonderful Pompidou Centre – why not travel to and rent apartments in Paris and enjoy both the show and the amazing city.

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Translated by: Poppy
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