The CAIRN (Centre for Research on Informal Art Nature) was born in Digne in 2000 from a partnership between the Gassendi Museum and the Haute-Provence Geopark.
This exhibition center offers an art program oriented towards nature. The CAIRN drives a policy generating artworks and projects outside the walls that facilitate exchanges between the public and the rich area of Digne. Through its production and distribution program, the will of this art center is to create a cross-border cooperation with Italy and boost its cultural influence at national and international level. All these tasks are organized in different formats: conferences, scholar visits, publications, artist residencies, support for the creation and temporary exhibitions of both artists from the emerging scene (Stéphane Thidet, Abraham Poincheval) as established artists (Mark Dion, Hubert Duprat, etc.).
Thus, the CAIRN art center wants to be situated closer with recent discursive approaches of contemporary art and develops a space for reflection at the confluence of art, nature and science.
With over 20 years of activity, the CAIRN allowed the installation of over one hundred artworks inside the Geopark de Haute Provence making this area an innovative place, unique in the world of encounter between the Contemporary Art, nature and landscapes.

 
Head: Nadine Gomez, Chief Curator of the Museum Gassendi, co-founder and director of CAIRN.
CAIRN Art Center is part of DCA, the French association for the development of art centers.

Refuge d'Art is a single, integral work of art, to be visited over a ten-day hike. Created by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy in partnership with the Musée Gassendi and the Haute-Provence Geopark, it is unique in Europe, involving an itinerary of 150 km that traverses a number of exceptional landscapes. It brings together hiking and contemporary art, thereby highlighting both nature and culture.

Linking up three Sentinels (stone cairns, each one located in the heart of a valley), the circuit follows ancient paths among the remnants of an agricultural way of life that was once intense. Goldsworthy wanted to mark the circuit with Refuges in the form of disused houses belonging to the non-protected rural heritage, including chapels, farms and sheepfolds. These have now been restored, and a specially-designed sculpture has been incorporated into each one. They provide shelter for a pause along the route, or indeed, in some cases, the possibility of an overnight stay.

This is the world's largest collection of works by Andy Goldsworthy in a public space. But, far from being a form of cultural overkill, it reveals itself gradually, often at the rate of just one Refuge or Sentinel in a day's walk.

www.refugedart.fr

Nicolas Rubinstein claims with a real pleasure his fascination with bones. Beyond the eminently structuring quality of these, the artist sees in the thigh bone, skulls and crossbones other places of an inaccessible secret which must be sought without rest. So, the skeleton becomes the central element of his work, the keystone on which a crazy production is based. If the bones are orchestrated with some virtuosity, they refer to nothing morbid and call more readily bulimia as exhaustion. As they unfold and build monumental architectures (suspension bridges, cathedrals 3 meters high ...) or replay to infinity and with humor the skeleton of a media mouse (Mickey) or a flying elephant. The list of material used by Nicolas Rubinstein tells the pleasure of each of his achievements. Polyester resin, bone, bronze, pencil, or painted rat ... www.documentsdartistes.org
Born in 1964 in Paris. Nicolas Rubinstein lives and works in Marseille. Represented by Thierry Salvador Gallery, Brussels.
 
Additional information: www.nicolas-rubinstein.com
CAIRN: http: //musee-gassendi.org/le-cairn/a-venir

The work of Marcos Avila Forero (born in 1983 in Paris, lives and works in Bogota and Paris) are immersed in the complex reality and sometimes violent political and social situations he returns not as an impartial observer, but mingling work elements (materials, stories, symbols) that constitute it. His works bear the imprint of an encounter, a story or a journey. They are micro-fiction made of odds and ends looking less to demonstrate or document that to confront the times and places that would not have met them.
Graduated in 2010 from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Marcos Avila Forero travels in 2011 in the Amazon to make TARAPOTO A, A Manati, work he presents inside the exhibition "Le vent d'Après" and gets the price Multimedia from The Foundations of Fine Arts. In 2012 he traveled to the border between Morocco and Algeria (closed for diplomatic conflict) and performs the CAYUCOvideo.

Additional information: www.galeriedohyanglee.com
CAIRN: http: //musee-gassendi.org/le-cairn/a-venir