A new iteration of UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE PRELUDE activated in March in Florian Fouché’s studio in Paris and at GwinZegal art center in Guingamp in October 2024, this exhibition follows on from the Assisted Manifesto, a vast survey of both perception and documentation on ‘assisted life’ begun in 2015 and presented at Bétonsalon in 2021, as part of the group exhibition “The body goes on strike”. It is rooted in the care path taken by Philippe Fouché, the artist’s father, who became a hemiplegic following a stroke. Since then, he has been accompanied by his son on a daily basis and has become the protagonist of ‘close actions’ in which the roles of care and assistance are redistributed. Taking into account the almost simultaneous closures of the care home (EHPAD) Robert Doisneau in Paris, which was home to Philippe, and the Centre Pompidou in 2025, Florian Fouché identifies critical correspondences and common failings between two systems of the French public sector, health and art. In the exhibition at Bétonsalon, Florian Fouché explores the relationship between the body and the medical and museum space, in the face of the gradual dismantling of the care systems for the most vulnerable, such as the A.M.E (State Medical Assistance), the gradual erosion of the universal health care and the precariousness of public cultural institutions. The story of Constantin Brâncuși’s studio provides the backdrop for this exploration: originally located at Impasse Ronsin in Paris, it was demolished after the artist’s death to make way for an additional wing of the Necker – Enfants malades hospital, and was then rebuilt in its current location, next to the Centre Pompidou, by Renzo Piano in 1997. Filmed in this reconstructed version of the Brâncuși’s studio in 2022 and featured in the exhibition, the film Institutional Life draws a parallel between the architecture of the hospital and the scenography designed by Renzo Piano, highlighting how body motricity is regulated by the corridors. A mobility, sometimes prevented, sometimes desired or forced, which echoes the positioning of certain sculptures by Brâncuși, which themselves lie, stand or sit. This reflection on the relationship between biopolitics and museography stems from the concept of the ‘antidote museum’ developed by the ethnologist Irina Nicolau at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, which served as the framework for a photographic and visual investigation begun by the artist in 2012. In contrast to the ‘hospital museum’, in which the works are static and kept at a distance from the public in order to guarantee their proper conservation, the scenography designed by Irina Nicolau encouraged a form of popular education through unique spatial arrangements, shattering the folkloric and nationalistic view of vernacular cultures and Brâncuși’s work promoted by the Romanian Communist regime before the 1989 revolution. In a similar vein, this exhibition aims to make tangible the ‘institutional lives’ of the people and works that inhabit and navigate these liminal and interstitial spaces, and which are confronted, in the case of Philippe as of the sculptures extracted from Brâncuși’s studio, with a form of displacement of bodies, from one medical-museum-institutional context to another. While childhood already plays a crucial role in Florian Fouché’s research into the educational experiments carried out by Fernand Deligny in the Cévennes with autistic and marginalized children, it finds an even more significant and political expression in this exhibition. Indeed, a new series of sculptures (Children born delinquent, 2024), refers directly to the much-criticised 2006 report from the National institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) – aimed at detecting future delinquents among very young children through biased behavioural analysis. This report served as the basis for a bill (not voted on) put forward the same year by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, which is part of a long genealogy of biological theories of crime going back to the concept of the ‘born criminal’ by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1887), expressions of an extreme right-winging tendency in French political discourse. In dialogue with this historical context, works based on elements of street furniture and signage question the social norms that induce certain forms of movement and determine how public space is used, often from an ableist perspective, that frequently results in the exclusion of mobility that cannot or refuses to conform. Through the interaction of this group of works, a new physiological, relational and even ‘orthopedic’ configuration of the bodies present/absent in the exhibition space takes shape, in the face of societal changes that affect them concretely, both at the individual and collective level.

For the past fifteen years, Hedwig Houben has been reflecting on production in a dialogue that initially involves two protagonists: the figure of the artist and the sculptures she produces. This dialogue between an omniscient narrator or unwilling spokesperson of the identities she creates has often taken the form of a lecture-performance, recorded and then broadcast on site alongside sculptures, in an exhibition. Using manipulable forms in plasticine or plaster, she has created a vast gallery of characters endowed with transitional identities. Occasionally, the artist allows others – family, students, institutional staff, collectors – to play the role of guide-interpreters of her work, offering their expert perspectives as people involved in the various processes of making, transforming, mediating or maintaining her works. As is often the case with Houben, this exhibition at Bétonsalon originates from a real-life experience that is interwoven with other accounts of similar situations and the concepts they convey. It all began with the artist’s hand suddenly shaking uncontrollably during a public speech. From this patent dysfunction, Houben draws several consequences, notably the representation of an independence of the members of her body from her own will, the manifestation of an open conflict. She also notices how reflexes, emotions and gestures are much faster than any articulated language and outpace it. From this physiological experience and inverted rhythm, Hedwig Houben draws a broader reflection on the agentivity of a hand that does not obey the subject’s intentions, places them in an uncomfortable situation. Frees itself from any injunction to be productive, the Hand prefers instead improvisation and rambling. Beyond the discomfort generated by this loss of control, this situation raises the question of the real or presumed vulnerability of the unity of a self, manifesting a split through the simple resistance of a body part who no longer conforms either to the expectations of a subject or to the social conventions. Although the Hand is a recurring character in Hedwig Houben’s performances, here it acquires a new independence: it acts first as an entity with a dual personality, whose duality is highlighted by the impossibility of superimposing the right and left hands. In massive, stable forms, two outstretched hands oppose each other: one palmar, open, hollow and helpful, collects and distributes; the other dorsal, also flat but full, is available to no one. What she calls the ‘Pleasant hand’ and the ‘Ureliable hand’ are two sides of the same hand, the right. While coordination between the two hands is generally a sign of good cooperation, Hedwig Houben likes to undo any directive body schema to imagine their conflicts, with one seeking to gain the upper hand over the other, and the other ignoring the first. In this scenario, left-handedness is a guarantee of emancipation from the cultural habitus that hinders their agentivity, leading her towards a form of regressive idleness, a salvific surrender. Elsewhere, the Hand is broken down into several protruding fingers, fixed on extra-flexible rods and equipped with cameras that can be manipulated to point and film from a non- optical point of view. With this visual device live streaming disordered interactions of images, Hedwig Houben seeks to decentre herself from the narrative scheme generated by the perspective of a single person, preferring instead the visual cacophony of an incomplete, unprogrammed, spontaneous multitude. The issues of interdependence that run through this exhibition are questions that Hedwig Houben addresses to herself and, more broadly, to her status as an artist and polyactive worker, but also to her dependence on and attempts at autonomy from the art world, a world that, moreover, knows how to plead collective causes while perpetuating the atomization of authorship within its own organizational structures. Without seeking to theoretically resolve these dilemmas common to many artists, the primary purpose of this exhibition would be to collectively formulate these questions, to find public forms that can be shared, and to engage with them in their most unresolved aspects.