'Three Views of Gardanne' is a site-specific art project, originating in three landscape paintings of Gardanne by the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. In Gardanne, southern France, Cézanne experimented with blocky polygonal forms of the surrounding townscape juxtaposed with organic forms of vegetation.

 

Working in the vicinity, near Aix-en-Provence, and using Cézanne's view as focal point, the work aims to capture a contemporary perspective of the hill town area, which today houses the world’s largest producer of specialty alumina. Every day hundreds of tons of polluted red-mud, the main by-product from the production, are created. The heavy metal contaminated and radioactive waste, are deposited at a residue site in Mange-Garri, a little town near by Gardanne, as well as poured via pipelines into the Mediterranean by the offshore waters of Cassis.

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Composed as an archive of natural studies. 'Three Views of Gardanne' is a visual and audible encounter, exhibited in three parts, using red-mud, pine needles and water collected from the disposal sites. The working process has been adopted from applications used in the natural sciences, radiation dosimetry and reuse of red-mud conferred to suggested firing techniques of building materials from the alumina industry.

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