Échappées d’art is an annual cultural event organized by the city of Angers, dedicated to promoting and celebrating urban art, encouraging residents to encounter surprising artworks around every corner and to see their public spaces in a new light.

For this ninth edition, titled “Histoires de la ville” (Stories of the city), the inhabitants of Angers and the entire urban area are invited, from May to September 2024, to discover a new program curated by Manifesto, featuring installations by artists Giada Ganassin, Amélie Asturia, Recycle Group, and Céline Ahond.

“In almost 10 years, Angers’ Échappées d’art have become one of the main public art collections in France. The key to this success is the development of the project throughout the city, for and with the residents, with a commitment to inclusiveness and diversity.”

- Nicolas Dufetel, Deputy Mayor for Culture and Heritage of the city of Angers

The “Histoires de la ville” trail showcases artistic practices directly inspired by the narratives embedded in Angers’ urban environment, its heritage, and its residents.

These creations respond to human situations and feed on the materials and stories that form the backdrop of this urban fresco in the city of Angers. They also engage with the culture, architecture, and artworks inherited by the city, reinterpreting them in the contemporary context. Some of these works invite the residents of Angers to participate in their creation or to interact with them in their finished form, revealing hidden stories of the city and its inhabitants. In this way, art transcends its role as a static object, drawing direct inspiration from city life and engaging with it in return.

Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov (Recycle Group) combine sculpture, installation, and digital art in large-scale works. Drawing references from the history of Western religious art, they reinterpret them through the lens of 21st-century technology and the new “mythologies” of daily life. Their bas-relief work is a major focus of their artistic production. Inspired by classical iconography, these works pay homage to an entire tradition of painting and sculpture.

Inspired by urban landscapes, Amélie Asturias gathers shapes, textures, and details from her surroundings. Her graphic compositions borrow from the codes of comic books. Through collaborative workshops with the association APF France Handicap, she has fully integrated the residents of Angers in the creation of two frescoes. In partnership with APF France Handicap and Angers Loire Habitat.

For the past ten years, Giada Ganassin has developed an artistic practice centered around the line, sometimes organic, sometimes geometric. To decorate the tramway, she wandered the streets and museums of Angers to imagine a series of scenes where each group of characters is connected by a continuous line, just as the city’s neighborhoods are linked by the tramway’s route. In partnership with Irigo.

Manifesto is assisting the City of Angers with the programming and production of the Echappées d’art urban art trail. For the 2024 edition, Echappées d’art is setting up participative workshops to bring the city’s residents as close as possible to the works. Through collaborative artistic workshops with the APF France Handicap Association, the artist Amélie Asturias has invited people from Angers and members of APF France Handicap to participate fully in the design and production of her works, so that they can use the public space in a different way through art. Amélie Asturias has also organised a drawing workshop with the public, using photographs to create free compositions inspired by different graphic genres, including comic strips. In her works, shapes, colours and perspectives are detached from their functions to become visual elements at the service of a new narrative. Finally, the artist Giada Ganassin took part in a screen-printing workshop in Angers with local artist Marie Leroy, to tie in with her work Les villes invisibles. Her work, a tramway wrap, was inspired by her own wanderings through the streets and museums of Angers. During the workshop, local residents were able to screen-print a design created by Giada Ganassin for the occasion, taken from her tramway wrap.