This exhibition is a continuation of Florian Fouché’s investigation into “assisted life”, begun in 2015 by accompanying the care path of his father, Philippe Fouché. Through a form of “wil rehabilitation”, they experiment with a dual ‘assistant-assisted” position, opening up spaces that are both paramedical and extra-artistic.

Florian Fouché acknowledges common failings between two publics services, healthcare and culture. He draws formal, critical and historical correspondences between the various metamorphoses of Brâncuși’s studio: demolished after the artist’s death in 1957 to make way for an additional wing of the Necker-Enfants maladies paediatric hospital, then reconstituted next to the Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano in 1997, it is now dismantled once again. Informed by the experiments of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in the 1990s, in contrast to the “hospital museum” and the museography of reconstitution, the exhibition makes tangible the ‘institutional lives” of both the people and the works that inhabit these liminal spaces, which are confronted with a form of translation of bodies, passing from one medical-museum-institutional context to another. Made from elements of street furniture, repurposed signage and found objects, the work on display questions the social norms induced by certain mobilities and ableist uses of public space–whether medical, museum or urban–and the way in which bodies constantly negotiate with restrictive frameworks, in a context of generalized precarization of public institutions.

The exhibition is supported by the ADAGP-French visual artists’ rights managements organization, within the framework of the ADAGP/Bétonsalon grant of which the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou is a partner. An exhibition co-produced with CEAAC, Strasbourg.