The artists at the Pavillon Neuflize OBC — the research lab at Palais de Tokyo — will be visiting Death Valley to journey across the American desert and its mythologies.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point provides the point of departure for this journey across the desert of the American West. The workshop combines a conceptual dimension and a perceptual apprehension, and invites the artists-in-residence to experiment with a dual reference point: the imaginary projections derived from the mythological representations articulate with the concrete journey through this arid, primitive, pioneering land. Which perspectives are opened up by this two-dimensional approach?

The objective is not to engender an artistic production immediately related to crossing Death Valley, but rather to experience the trip as a lived journey through a vast geological and symbolic space.

This experience will be explored two months later in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, in June 2013.