VOUS ÊTES ICI (You Are Here) [version française]
Rethinking the modalities and procedures of the exhibition and the contact with spectators.
In a particular context (cf. Places) and for a determined amount of time (deliberately short), artists involved in various practices relate their different conceptions of artistic work. The exhibition is not an act alien to the work’s content. The shared place and time of elaboration leads each artist to consider their position within the group. Each proposal integrates the problematic of its showing.
Group
VOUS ETES ICI is not a movement.
It is an open framework through which artists can meet, confront or connect their reflections and define objectives in common. VOUS ETES ICI is not an unvarying group but a structure offering the opportunity to carry out projects. It is made up as the artists are invited to intervene, in the modality they prefer (on the spot, distant elaboration, individual or collective initiatives, etc.).
According to the context, each artist can choose to intervene or not and ask for others to participate: the group gets reorganized. A new articulation of the exhibition principles is constructed on the basis of the singularities brought together.
Places
Busy or vacant places, places of work, of passage, living places, private or public places (flats, business or industrial premises, offices, gardens, etc.).
A particular place becomes the condition of the work, the unity of time and space shared by the creations. This plurality implies a mobility: VOUS ETES ICI is a ‘wandering place’. More than occupying places, the point is to create situations.
Experiences
Places can be selected according to the specific expectations of certain artists and can suggest new working methods t others, or enlarge the frame of the interventions (the neighborhood, the landlord, the users, etc.)
VOUS ETES ICI proposes an individual and collective work experience, along with the “adjustments” implied by this kind of experience. The result is a range of work hypotheses and provisory connections and the risk taken in showing them. These proposals that make “points of view” circulate, may prompt the spectator to consider their own position and derive singular experiences.
Address
Our attachment to appear in different places (cf. Variety) that are not necessarily related to usual cultural channels (cf. drift, diversion) makes us address indetermined audiences.
The “how to meet” has to be reinvented each time.
During the exhibition, the presence of the artists may offer the opportunity of dialogues and exchanges.
Creating a tension between the inscription and the event so as to avoid conditions of exhibition turning the works into signs or the very event obscuring their content.
Variety
Each one, with their own apprehension, sets the ‘mechanism’ in action.
Based on the intention to create a common and overall coherence, the variety of the contexts of appearance, of the artists, the proposals of VOUS ETES ICI and the diversity of reactions imply, contrary to any attempt at finding a common pattern to the works that would level perceptions, that the basic disparity of the artistic approaches is assumed. This is the condition for the provisional ‘collective constructions’ to have the ability to disrupt the spectators habits. Project
The exhibitions of VOUS ETES ICI consist in bringing together a number of (invited) artists involved in various practices to work with a particular place: busy or vacant places, work places, places of passage or living places, private or public places. The proposals are elaborated, for each artist and collectively, in reaction to the context that the place offers.
The place becomes the pretext and context of the work.
VOUS ETES ICI is a real work structure within which each one raises hypotheses meant to help reconsider what it means to show one’s work and meet the public. |