Catherine Rannou

Catherine Rannou was born in 1964 in Chartres - Eure & Loire, France. She is an architect and graduated from the School of Architecture, Paris Tolbiac. She also has a Certificate of Professional Aptitude as a carpenter. The main focus of her work is in architecture and visual arts. In 1990 she was awarded the European prize and since then she has been recognised for her research into experimental housing in urban gap sites. Her work has been shown at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and internationally. In collaboration with I. Devin, architect, she designed and created 'the Garden of Winds' (1991), and the 'Garden of Dunes' (1998) for the Parc de La Villette, two parts of a cinematic promenade designed by Bernard Tschumi. In 1994 she was invited to participate in the exhibition 'Les Ateliers de L'ARC' in the Museum of Modern Art, Paris where she exhibited some of the material designed and displayed in the Parc de La Villette. During a residency in Sarajevo in 1996, she produced her first videos around the theme of contemporary ruins. An installation, 'Projections', using images and construction site rubble was shown at the Limerick City Art Gallery in Ireland (curator: Virginia Perz-Ratton / Costa Rica) and in Centre d'art Passerelle in Brest, France in 2008 (curator: Ulrike Kremeier / Germany). More recently, a video showing the colonisation of the green algues on the Brittany coast has be projected during the Limerick Biennale of Comtemporary Arts (curator: Salam M. Hassan / New York). Since 2004, Catherine Rannou has been teaching at the National School of Architecture in Rennes, Brittany and has been designing housing in a collaborative cross-over between art & architecture and with agricultural hangar constructers. In 2006, she designed a self-made house out of containers, 'Derniers Voyages' (Last Journeys). After a successful application in 2006 to go to French Antarctic Base, Dumont d'Urville, she boarded the Astrolabe, the Paul Emile Victor French Polar Institute (IPEV) ship. Her interests at that time were focused on the constructions and the movements on unexplored territory, where the to and fro of equipment, waste and the inhabitants became the focus of her first Antarctic experience. The first results formed the works 'Déplacements habités' and 'Cartographie de l'éphémère' concerned with a mapping of the Antarctic landscape. The French Foreign Office Bursary, 'Culture France – Hors les Murs' allowed her to pursue her research in collaboartion with the IPEV and the glaciology laboratory of L.G.G.E. in Grenoble. During the 2008-2009 austral summer, she went to the bases Dumont d'Urville and Concordia to develop her project for a 'GlacioMobile' (a mobile shelter and scientific laboratory). It also provided the opportunity for her to pursue her work on ephemeral cartography and travel within the polar context.