In this exhibition, Anne Le Troter continues her exploration of the mechanisms of language and the power of speech through sound, writing and installation. Laureate of the 2021 ADAGP grant dedicated to the Marc Vaux Archive, she approaches the thousands of photographic plates as a huge sound archive populated by the voices of artists. From 1920 to 1970, Marc Vaux documented the Paris art world, photographing artists and models, works of art, exhibits, salons, artists’ workshops, galleries, cafés, balls, parties as well as a great number of administrative documents. With nearly 130,000 photographs, the collection held at the Pompidou Centre’s Kandinsky Library offers an image of the Parisian art scene as a hybrid and transnational centre of creation. It bears witness to a day-to-day reality fed by individual and collective histories; widely divergent from the narrative of a homogenous modernity collected around a few heroic figures. Of the five thousand artists represented, Anne Le Troter is interested in the more anonymous figures, activists and federators; such as Marie Vassilieff, who opened a “popular canteen for artists and models” in 1914, Louise Hervieu, who founded an “association to establish the health booklet” in 1937, and Marc Vaux himself, who hosted a “mutual aid centre for artists and intellectuals” in 1946. Inspired by the detours of the lives of artists involved in care, Anne Le Troter composed a sound play in which she gives voice to polyactive artists, caregivers or patients, art therapists, models, nurses, paramedics, resistance fighters. Sounding their words in the interstices of mute images, she composed conversations among them about their health, their work-related illnesses, their mobilizations, the material conditions of their lives … To do so, she invited living art workers – Victoire Le Bars, Ségolène Thuillart, Simon Nicaise, Nour Awada, Agathe Boulanger, Martin Bakero, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Simon, Eva Barto and Juliette Mailhé – to lend their voices and talk to the “not-dead” artists of the Marc Vaux collection – Suzanne Duchamp, Henri-Georges Adam, Marie Vassilieff, Max Beckmann, Joy Ungerer, Jean Cocteau, Anne Chapelle, Bessie Davidson, Madeleine Dumas, Ossip Zadkine, Claudette Bergougnoux, Kiki de Montparnasse, Paul Éluard, Joséphine Baker… The various protagonists of this sound piece navigate through the fragments of a French history of art and of healthcare policies for artists; they observe both their affiliation with the general social security system and their social insecurity (no maternity leave, nor leave for work-related illness or injury); they recount the struggles of art workers, retrace the advent of the health booklet, listen to the gaffes of old age insurance, and allow themselves to be guided by mutual aid, pigment and medicine. Through their conversations, the people who Anne Le Troter calls “the volunteers” compose a new trans-historic identity. Together, they develop a medical autobiography of a hybrid collective body. At Bétonsalon, this polyphonic narrative coils itself into the art centre: voices run along fragile metallic ramifications cropping out of flaws in the floor; networks of audio cables cascade softly from the ceiling to connect with tiny, shell-less speakers and come to caress a sound floor; breathing and bodily fluids make the glass surfaces vibrate. This exposed sound mechanics is incarnated in the material of the space as though by a vast, amplified, carnal envelope. The sound conductivity is everywhere fragile, requiring particular attention, from the feet to the ears. As you listen, words mingle with the noises of this reconstructed collective body and the ambient sounds adhere to the words. These two sources of sound might appear to be opposite – one discursive, the other noisy – but by listening attentively, we see that they change through contact with each other; the meaning blurs and the noise takes on meaning.

Tiphaine Calmettes creates a new series of sculptures that allow you to sit down to taste a drop of kombucha, drink a flower tea kept warm in a gargoyle’s stomach, help yourself to broth from a hollow amidst bread crusts, smell the warm redolence of all this cuisine, follow trickles of water as they dribble out of a monster’s mouth, observe ochre light filtered through a dried kombucha starter, feel the earthy cavities of the surfaces around…. These sculptures are assemblages of previous experiences, works or rejects that have not completed their metamorphosis: under their own inertia and due to wear and tear, some materials give way under their own weight, or seep, crack or evaporate as they are sensitive to heat. All of them are doomed to be further transformed after the exhibition. Whether shaped by skilful hands or left in their initial state, they undergo involuntary transformations on their own. These versatile shapes have not only ingested the various strata of the artist’s work, they have also experienced motifs from distant periods–anthropomorphic utensils, stony plants, animals with pouring lips… –an entire monstrous bestiary drawn from a sort of imaginary natural history. “Primordial soup” is a term associated with a scientific theory that says that life on Earth is the result of spontaneous generation within a milieu warm and sticky enough to allow life to arise. A whole ecosystem sustains itself in this primordial soup. These sensory sculptures that seem to have emerged from a troglodyte kitchen, turn Bétonsalon into an inhabitable place. Thanks to them, Bétonsalon settles into a sort of telluric domesticity.

Bétonsalon is partnering with Le Plateau, Frac Île-de-France to host a two-part exhibition by Judith Hopf. Since the 2000s, the German artist has been making sculptures and films fuelled by her reflections on the relationships that human beings have with technology. For this first monographic exhibition in France, Judith Hopf unites existing and previously unseen works. Some of them resonate from one exhibition to the other. Its title, Énergies, refers to what fuels each of our everyday electrical appliances, viewed from both a technical and philosophical perspective. While at Le Plateau, the works revolve around the transformation of the landscape into a source of energy, it is more a question of its consumption at Bétonsalon. A sculpture created for the exhibition represents a lightning bolt, a natural explosion that highlights the origin of electricity, its power and danger. Its use is at the heart of Énergies, where sculptures and films suggest a world dependent on electricity consumed without consideration for the terms of its production. We discover the Phone Users, human figures busy looking at their telephones. Absorbed in the contemplation of their screens, they seem cut o from their immediate environment, which is comprised of oversized apple peel sculptures. Judith Hopf’s work is full of the contradictions that pervade our daily lives and which she brings to light in all their strangeness. The numerous inversions and shifts that she brings into play in her work, by representing scenes that are so familiar that they become unusual, even ironic, are an invitation to think of alternatives, to see differently rather than to consume more and more quickly. Moreover, Énergies reminds us that in this age of videoconferencing, large quantities of electricity and human energy are needed to set up exhibitions. The Phone Users are a metaphor for this, presuming that they try to reach each other between the two exhibitions, and that they try to communicate to the extent of announcing to each other: “There’s no network”.