Exhibition Gifts of artists Aldébaran – Castries- 2012

A Viennese family has passed down the secrets of making snow globes from generation to generation.

The first Erwin Perzy of the dynasty, founded a company manufacturing these globes one hundred and ten years ago. 

It was in its workshops that the most famous snow globe in the world was created, the one that the hero of the cult film by Orson Wells lets slip when he dies,  Citizen Kane  in 1941…

This is how the idea of capturing certain movie scenes in a snow globe was born. 

Behind the mask of kitsch, scenes from famous films that mix the comic, the abject and the tragic and snow globes that we shake, then  must shake again to reproduce  the ephemeral cloud of suspended flakes.  

The consumer society tends to devalue manufactured products, of which the snow globe is the perfect example. From a technical find, a source of wonder for visitors to the Universal Exhibition of 1878, it has become a pinnacle of kitsch.

Luckily the artistic approach is there to steal everyday objects from their sad fate.

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Snow fight: 

Immediate reference to German Expressionist cinema, its mind-blowing sets, but not only since some more recent films include the series of 10 snow-globes.

The common thread of the reinterpreted sketches is the staircase in the cinema, and its power to create an abyss.

The little characters in these snow globes don't seem concerned by the film mentioned, they are pursuing their own story, in a ridiculously small world.