Wood and steel sculptures created with a contemporary design combining wood and steel elements to create truly dynamic sculptures.
Nantes and the Rise of the Machines
Nantes was a surprise. A city, straddling the Loire, associated historically with ship building, but now that industry has moved elsewhere, reinventing itself in really novel and inspirational ways.
One of the first decisions that was taken looks to have been the establishment (or perhaps simply development) of Nantes as a University town - as every town and city in the UK is now doing. Allied to this, was the decision to develop it as a creative hub, which has resulted in a proliferation of street art of dubious quality and rather strange-looking buildings, some of which work and some of which don’t.
But a key decision, which seems to me likely to pay off in spades over the coming decades, is to centre the re-generation of the ship-building heart of Nantes - situated on the Isle de Nantes in the middle of the Loire - on the Rise of the Machines.
We have seen the Machines in the UK - for example when Liverpool was City of Culture and they were so well received that they now appear to have become an annual attraction. But a parade of mechanical marionettes is one thing - using the same technique to regenerate the industrial heart of a city is quite another.
I think it will work and if it does, it will be because of some extremely brave decisions taken by the city council a number of years ago - decisions that put to shame the risk-averse, short-termists who run most of the UK’s local areas.
So far, there is not all that much to see to support the contention that the Machines are going to put Nantes on the world map.
There is a giant elephant - three times the size of a normal elephant - who wanders round the old shipyard, carrying fifty people on his back, blowing spray at the crowd and stopping for an occasional giant elephant sized pee (which of course is only water).
He travels from the workshop, out to the second main attraction - the Carousel - and back.
The Carousel I was less taken with - mainly because all the action appears to be on the inside and I could not be persuaded to pay - again - to have a look. But for those who do make the investment, I am sure it is worthwhile. The creatures draw their inspiration from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Jules Verne was born in Nantes and appears to have been one of of the inspirations behind the Machines, which is part Jules Verne’s “invented Worlds”, part Leonardo da Vinci and part Nantes shipbuilding history, mixed with a healthy dollop of theatrical inspiration.
But all this is merely the curtain-raiser to the main event, which is slowly taking place in the workshops, with completed elements shown off in the Gallery of the Machines. The next major project is the Arbre aux Herons or the Tree of the Herons, which will be a steel tree 160 feet across and about 115 feet high, made up of 22 enormous steel branches that you will be able to walk around and home to a variety of mechanical wonders, including two flying herons, each with a 24 foot wingspan, spiders, caterpillars, a sloth and others oddities that will be able to move along the branches.
The Tree will dwarf the Elephant and the Carousel and, in its scale, reminded me a little of the home tree in Avatar. When completed, it will weigh as much as a small cargo ship!
In case this all sounds a little mechanical, it is worth pointing out that all the branches will be planted up with an array of vegetation, which will mean that the Tree becomes, in a very real sense, a living entity.
In one respect, the Machines is very like La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona as both clearly illustrate the enormous positive benefits of tourism, as they are being paid for by us. But whereas Segrada Familia will, eventually, be completed - the world of The Machines is only limited by the imaginations of the team behind it and at the moment that seems to be ever expanding.
Also worthy of special mention in Nantes is the aptly-named Jardin des Plantes which is a beautifully landscaped and maintained park containing a collection of exotic trees from all over the world. It is a delight.