Mari Mira, the Fancy Shack Spirit

Mari Mira, the Fancy Shack Spirit, a transportable village, a work in progress urban art environment.

An evolving transportable village whose houses, outdoor constructions, dependencies, furniture, objects, and gardens are constructed and presented in open air public spaces. Fifteen years of creating, dismantling and transporting the Mari-Mira experience in different continents, Africa, Europe, Oceania leads us today, with 17 popular eccentric artists/DIY (architects, musicians, visual artists) from around the world, to set up this 6000m2 installations in innovative towns wanting to deal with art as a link to social issues.

With an artistic vision linked to installations and environmental works, the idea is to reach out to artists/inventors who blend their creative practices within the everyday practice of life. It’s about “a home-thought-made-art” creating poetical environments out of discarded and disregarded objects and materials, giving importance to things that seem mundane or ordinary and to live it as a possibility of wonder and « political » engagement.

« Mari-Mira combine the concern to economize and the joy of unearthing the elements for lush reveries in waste and materials without value ».

On each occasion in a town or country, a new pool of local artists/inventors/DIY together with Guy-André Lagesse artist/facilitator and initiator of the project, proceed in the creation of new elements which comes and enriches previous works. It pays tribute to what we could call the “shack spirit”, this particular lifestyle which includes Mauritians’ tiny creole cabins, the “cabanons” in the South of France, the worker’s garden sheds, the fishermen’s shacks, the South Africans’ umjondolo… Our concern is less the aesthetic construction of these habitat, than the meander of thoughts which lead to the construction of a certain way of life.

“As under every stone there is a world with its own meanings, in every room there is the expression of one’s attitude to the world.”

Where Mari-Mira sets up, it is open to sounds, colors, forms and perceivable ways of living while constantly creating poetic matters out of every day life. An outdoor studio is installed on location to facilitate exchanges with the public while the artists are busy creating. Mari-Mira, open daily is a poetical play ground, where guides share with the visitors, in a whimsical manner, the notion of home trekking, tailor-made lifestyle, adapting the non adaptable, clumsiness as possibility to innovate, etc… It’s a start for series of activities, workshops, discussions concerning the creative power, of relationship beyond social boundaries, through an artistic attitude.