Romain Grateau Grand tourisme à injection, 2021 Reinforced concrete bookcase: Portland cement, sand, mineral fillers, steel, oxides and pigments, encaustic, 300 x 215 x 35 cm. Photo : © DR. An in situ work that will store the collection of books and documents of Bétonsalon, this bookcase by Romain Grateau is a knowing pun on the art centre’s name, a literalized vision of the form that un salon en béton [a concrete living-room] might take. A self-supporting structure, the bookcase extends and appropriates the functional architecture of the space through its modulation of horizontal lines and support modules. Combining tapered and squat columns with slightly skewed modules whose forms are at once rough and delicate, the different processes used to create this unit are clearly visible in the finished piece, offering a multiplicity of possible variations upon a material that is usually synonymous with standardized industrial production. Grateau plays with numerous densities, colourings, finishes and embedded elements, challenging our perception and our ability to separate rubble from art object. By combining careful touches of ornamentation with the heavy-duty techniques of construction, he blends genres and registers from masonry to self-build and from Rocaille to brutalism. The title of the work, drawn from the world of automobiles, refers to a technology that allows vehicles to travel long distances at high speeds. Grateau’s bookcase invokes this mixture of poetry, precision, power and mechanics, whilst subverting a form of masculinity anchored in bodily exertion and physical feats.   Mathilde Belouali   Sylvie Fanchon BONJOURSINOUSDISCUTIONS, 2021-… Series of 10 sentences in Blanc de Meudon on Bétonsalon’s windows Commission « oeuvre in situ », Bétonsalon — Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, 2021-2025. Photo : Marc Domage, © Galerie Maubert et Adagp, Paris, 2025. Daubed in whitewash, the four windows at one end of Bétonsalon’s glass façade are transformed into a pictorial surface. One after another, ten enigmatic phrases will be etched out within the whitewash in a standard font, devoid of any punctuation and rendered in tightly packed lettering. Over the course of the exhibition, Bétonsalon’s team will trace out a new phrase as each previous one is worn away. The short affirmations that make up this work by painter Sylvie Fanchon are uttered by Cortana, an intelligent voice assistant developed by Microsoft in the 2010s that is still in use despite already having been made obsolete. Toeing the line between politeness and pushiness, invitation and imperative, Cortana attempts to make itself useful (IMHERETOHELPDOYOUNEEDANYTHING), to engage users in conversation (HELLOHOWABOUTACHAT) or to improve their productivity (ICANREMINDYOUOFIMPORTANTTHINGSANDMUCHMORE), whilst at the same time warning them not to get too familiar (PLEASEDONTPROVIDEANYPRIVATEINFORMATION). Its limitations nonetheless soon become apparent (IMSORRYIDONTUNDERSTAND). This simple yet already unintelligible language is characteristic of the straightforward and one-dimensional relationships offered by artificial intelligence assistants, which, beneath a helpful and servile veneer, gather information to increase technology companies’ profits and power. Fanchon’s pictorial production is based on pre-existing elements drawn from language and visual culture. Here she uses Cortana, a device at once intrusive, dystopian and comical, as a source of motifs for her paintings and in situ interventions. Facing out over the esplanade in front of Bétonsalon, eliciting questions and curiosity, Cortana’s invitations and their apparent authority are contrasted with the fragility and transparency of the surface on which they are inscribed.   Mathilde Belouali  

Can you write about art with mittens? Having your hands full of plaster? Having you nose to the grindstone? What does the color of the exhibition floor, a rumbling stomach, boredom or the bus ride to get here do to our perception of artworks? How to write without passion? How do we write about things we don’t understand? Is there not always a moment when we say too much ? These are questions that we will not answer in this workshop, but perhaps we will only try to answer them, or if not, ask other questions. This workshop is for all those who have insomnia writing about and around art, come and share your words.

Bétonsalon is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023: 20 years of exhibitions, productions of works, performances, seminars and colloquiums, original texts and new translations, discussions, encounters, workshops, and unlisted initiatives that have been developed and supported by many people. Even though the institution has changed internally, what is our history and identity today? How can we, having arrived here relatively recently, represent the history of the institution and, in turn, tell it? How can we go through the history of the art centre, and create a collective memory that is open to reading and writing? How can we position Bétonsalon in the world of art institutions in France and worldwide? After 20 years, the time has come to look back at this institution, to initiate a process of self-reflection to draw up current perspectives, informed by past experiences and by these manifold histories. Working together, we will gradually delve into the history of Bétonsalon and Villa Vassilieff in a spirit of research and experimentation, with a critical and reflective approach, we will create our methodology by observing those explored here, collecting micro-histories and counter-histories, personal or collective statements, to enable us to re-establish links and even extend certain experiences. On the basis of a meeting for each exhibition, every three months, we will progressively and over several years, carry out a case-by-case interpretation of Bétonsalon. Project by project, we will gradually open the paper and digital archives, and we will search the documentary collection for publications associated with each project. And because the memory of a place, like the history of art, must be comprised of the memories of the people who have animated it, we will call upon the people concerned who initiated, animated or simply passed through such and such a project, seeking to open up this exploration to all the “stakeholders” (Parties prenantes is the title of a 2009 exhibition) according to their affinities: volunteers from previous teams, individual, collective or associative players, artists, curators, the public, partners, students, professionals, university staff, residents, children, walkers, dog owners, shopkeepers… For us, it will be a time of self-reflective research, in motion, with a view to re-constituting the archives and a living memory.

Fiercely independent, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki never stopped forging new paths and asserting their dissidence. Since the mid-1970s, they have built up a protean body of work in which cinema rubs shoulders with performance and photography and extends into immersive installations. In what they called Cinéma Corporel [Cinema of the Body], the body and identity become a site for aesthetic and political exploration. In their first films and performances of expanded cinema, they cast a reinvented gaze upon the female body and desire by producing images that subvert patriarchal imagination. By filming and photographing each other, the two artists created an unprecedented intercorporeality. Their joint signature, the signature of two women, is considered unique in cinema (Laura Mulvey, 2016). From the early 1980s, Klonaris and Thomadaki began transgressing the limits of sexual identity by featuring non-normative bodies — “dissident” bodies as they called them — like that of the hermaphrodite or intersex “Angel”. By unleashing the symbolic power of these figures in installations and works that are themselves hybrid, the two artists gave shape to a radical and strikingly contemporary reflection on gender. Formally, their work is characterised by a critical refusal of boundaries between disciplines and an attraction to ephemeral forms: projections, transparencies, time-based media (film, sound) or temporialised photography, live performance (expanded cinema) and immersive installations and environments. Today, Bétonsalon is teaming up with Katerina Thomadaki and independent curator Maud Jacquin, who has been accompanying the two artists’ work for several years. Together, they are developing a long-term research project on Klonaris/Thomadaki’s body of work considered through the prism of performance and its relationship to questions of gender and identity. Borrowed from Manifeste pour un cinéma corporel [Manifesto for a Cinema of the Body] written by Klonaris/Thomadaki in 1978, the title of this research underlines the assertion, through performance, of a rebellious subjectivity, capable of exploding frameworks – of both identity and artistic media — in a profusion of ever-transforming images eluding the fixity of categorisation. Through exhibitions, publications and events organised at Bétonsalon and with partner institutions, we will look at the following different perspectives: filmed and photographed performance / the body as an “active screen”; performed cinema / the explosion of norms; performing the archive / the infinity of possibilities. The key aim of this research is therefore to consider the relationships between cinema, photography, performance and gender in Klonaris/Thomadaki’s work and to highlight the singular contribution of both artists to performance theories and practices. Another major issue concerns the conservation and exhibition of their expanded cinema works that combine performative elements with the projection of films and slides, often accompanied by sound creations. The artists performed these technically complex works together in public. The death of Maria Klonaris in 2014 has made impossible the presentation of these works in their original form, thus emphasising the need to make them accessible again in updated formats. To kick start this research, an exhibition around the duo’s The Angel Cycle will be shown at Bétonsalon, from 26th September to 14th December 2024. This series of works was inspired by a medical photograph of an intersex person, at once a sublime figure and a body suffering from its stigmatisation, which they explore and celebrate through an experience that brings together intersexuality and intermedia.

What kind of world do we dream of when we grow up? How can we dream it together? How do we write it down? The “Copier-Coller“ project invites schoolchildren from the Thomas Mann school (Paris) to take hold of the immediate and familiar world, the better to get rid of it, by cutting it up, tearing it apart and putting certain pieces back together again. By introducing the students to the notions of originality, cut-up and pseudonym in literature, and the sample technique in music, the artist invites them to reconsider the way they perceive themselves and others, and themselves in relation to others. Imagining that each of us is made up of a sum of influences all our own, the project invites us to draw inspiration from figures near and far, to assert our own specificity, while at the same time putting our differences into perspective. Carrying a plural and composite voice, the young people will develop – through writing workshops followed by sound and vocal experimentation – a universe populated by dreamed-up versions of themselves, where everything has to be collectively reinvented.  By defining the parameters of this ecosystem so that their alter-egos can flourish, they will project a reality determined by their desires, and not the other way around. For this project, artist Manon Michèle invites musician and producer Emilien Point Afana to contribute to the making of this textual and sonic world.

Building on the connections established between Les Ailes Déployées, a mental health support association, and Bétonsalon since 2024 through the “Young Mediators Program” in Sylvie Fanchon’s exhibition “SOFARSOGOOD”, the project “How Do You Do It?” supports several groups of teenagers and young adults—attending the day units of Espace Ados (for teenagers), Espace Jeunes Adultes (EJA), and Espace Mogador (for adults)—in writing, designing, and producing an editorial mediation tool aimed at young audiences. The Bétonpapier is a playful illustrated publication for children aged 6–11 that helps youngs people discover exhibitions. Each issue is created in collaboration with an invited young illustrator and the graphic design studio Catalogue Général : • For the exhibition “UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE PRELUDE – Institutional Lives” by Florian Fouché, teenagers from Espace Ados will collaborate with illustrator Jeanne Bouillard and will offer a guided tour for users of Espace Jeunes Adultes. • For Hedwig Houben’s exhibition, young adults from EJA will collaborate with an invited illustrator and will offer a guided tour for users of Espace Ados. • For Orla Barry’s exhibition, adults of Espace Mogador will collaborate with an invited illustrator and will offer a guided tour for users of Espace Ados and EJA. By placing at the heart of the project the participants’ appropriation of the art center space and the practices of invited artists, “How Do You Do It?” brings participants’ voices into the narratives shared with audiences throughout the exhibitions. It questions institutional discourse and so-called legitimate knowledge about artworks, as well as the expected roles and functions of art professionals and visitors.

“Tu vois je veux dire” is an Artistic and Cultural Education project run by Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research (Paris, 13th), Ivry’s Contemporary Art Centre – Le Crédac (Ivry-sur-Seine, 94) and La Briqueterie – National Choreographic Development Center of Val-de-Marne (Vitry-sur-Seine, 94), in collaboration with the Adolphe Chérioux highschool in Vitry-sur-Seine, Marianne High School in Villeneuve-le-Roi, and Armand Guillaumin High School in Orly. Initiated in 2023-2024, the “Tu vois je veux dire” project takes as its starting point Bétonsalon’s Young Mediators Program and allows high school students to experiment with different forms of mediation around artistic practices from both visual and performing arts. Continuing in 2024-2025, this project seeks—through observation, listening, encounters with artists and art professionals, dialogue, and artistic practice—to challenge the traditional roles and voices associated with discourse on artworks within cultural and artistic institutions. It does so by imagining and inventing original public engagement formats: podcasts, dance-based tours, design publication, and more. In 2024-2025, the project expands to two new high schools: students from six classes will share and experiment with new ways of engaging in and delivering mediation around performances and dance shows they will select from the program of the Val-de-Marne Dance Biennale, organized by La Briqueterie: • At Adolphe Chérioux High School, a class will work with artist Fanette Lambey on Alain Platel’s performance “Coup Fatal” to design a T-shirt and create a performance-based mediation informed by congolese sapology on the show for another class in the school. •  At Marianne High School, a general 10th-grade class will work on a performance from the Biennale to produce an original mediation for another class. •  At Armand Guillaumin High School, an 11th-grade vocational class will work on a Biennale performance to create an original mediation for another class.

For the residency The Thick Present, Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke will undertake a writing project on fires, by weaving various narrative, poetic, political, and theoretical threads – superimposing, opposing, and intertwining them. The starting point for this exploration is the author’s grandmother, Clara, a fire lookout in the American West during the 1940s and 1950s. Stationed for several months alone on a mountain peak, she had to monitor the surrounding forest and alert the fire department if a fire started. At the time, the fire prevention measures stated that all fires had to be extinguished by 10 am the next day. Photographs, memories, and textual fragments have survived from this period of Clara’s life, along with a highly literary but very male imaginary: Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, for instance, both worked as fire lookouts and wrote about their time in the service. Clara’s rejection of conformist and gender norms questions our (gendered) relationship to nature, to fire (from wildfires to domestic hearths), and to their intersection (must all fires be eradicated or must we learn to live with them?). Firewatches and the “zero fire” policy they operated under during the 20th century, although they might seem romantic, in fact allowed organic waste to accumulate, disrupting the area’s ecosystem, and thus strongly contributing to the current situation in the American West, where fire seasons are now year-long, and megafires, which are both a consequence and a cause of global heating, destroy millions of acres, causing long-term air and water pollution. The Ponderosa and Douglas fir forests in the area in fact evolved alongside low-intensity natural fires, as well as controlled fires lit by Native Americans, which regularly cleansed the forests, helping them thrive and avoiding overly fierce fires.¹ When they are old enough, Ponderosa and Douglas firs can in fact survive the fire that clears the undergrowth. Therefore, colonial attitudes and the “zero fire” policy they entailed radically disrupted both the ecosystem and a special relationship to the forest characterised by a caring attitude towards living organisms², a disruption that reaches far into the present. The ambivalent nature of this history, and, more broadly, of fire, will inspire the writing of a novel depicting a series of investigations, whose tentacles will intertwine through pitch-thick time: · An (auto)biographical investigation: an attempt to reconstruct Clara’s experience as a lookout in relation with the rest of her life, including a period of field investigation in Oregon; · A scientific investigation: an overview of the current research, in order to understand the dynamics, causes, and consequences of forest fires today, leading to discussions with researchers from the Centre des politiques de la terre. How can we live with fire, an element ubiquitous in our imaginations yet absent from our daily lives, which are paradoxically sustained by fossil fires from deep time, quietly consuming the planet’s resources and liveability? · A fictional investigation: a final section of the novel recounts the discovery of a secret pyromaniac community, which experiences fire in a utopian, joyful, and radical way – a fire at the heart of life. By layering facts, times, and fiction, this project seeks to reveal the knottiness of our age – the Pyrocene.³

Bétonsalon and the ADAGP share a common commitment to working closely with artists, promoting visual heritage, and rereading and exploring ignored areas of art history. They have joined forces to offer a research grant program enabling an artist to develop a research project over several months on issues of image representation, production and circulation, based on archival collections. In 2025, the ADAGP and Bétonsalon are launching a new call for applications for the eighth edition of this grant which is an endowment of €15,000. This grant is intended to cover artist’s fees (€4,000), production costs (€8,000) including travel and accommodation expenses, as well as Bétonsalon’s mentorship fees (€3,000). This research grant enables artists to undertake the production of new works in a context conducive to experimentation with non-linear models of production and distribution of knowledge between researchers, artists, institutions and the public. Initiated in 2017 with the Bibliothèque Kandisky, initially around the Marc Vaux collection, then extended in 2022 to the entire photography archives of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, the grant will be associated in 2025 with the Archives de la critique d’art, in Rennes. This 8th edition of the grant is intended to allow an artist to develop a research and production project based on the Nathalie Magnan collection (INHA-Collection Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes). For this edition, the laureate’s work will be presented in a double exhibition dedicated to the legacy of Nathalie Magnan at the contemporary art center Les Capucins, in Embrun, Hautes-Alpes, and at Bétonsalon, in the second half of 2026. Les précédent·es lauréat·es sont franck leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir (2022), Irma Name (2023) et Florian Fouché (2024). Artistic committee and selection process The research and production grant is awarded by an artistic committee of art professionals, who will meet in June 2025. 5 candidates will be shortlisted in April 2025 and invited to develop a preliminary project outlining the scope of the research. These projects will be reviewed and discussed during individual interview with the artistic committee on June 10, 2025. Each shortlisted candidate will be compensated €200 for this preparatory work. The research period will run through September 2025 to June 2026, and will conclude with a public presentation as part of a group show at Bétonsalon and the contemporary art center Les Capucins, in Embrun, Hautes-Alpes, in the second half of 2026. How to apply This call is reserved for French artists: living or working in France for at least 5 years, or of French nationality living abroad. Candidates must submit an application in French before April 16, 2025, at 2pm. The application procedure is consultable via this link. The application file must include the following material: • A presentation or your artistic practice (300 words max) • A description of your research project for the grant, specifying your approach to Nathalie Magnan’s work and the type of document identified in the Archives de la critique d’art collection (500 words max) • A biography (300 words max) • A CV (2 pages max) • A portfolio presenting your work (10 pages max) • An affidavit signed by the artist (document template to download from the online application page) Schedule: – Deadline for applications: 16 April 2025 at 2pm – Shortlist of 5 candidates: April 2025 – Individual interviews: 10 June 2025 – Announcement of the laureate: mid-June 2025 Applications to be submitted online: https://candidatures.adagp.fr/index For any questions, please contact: info@betonsalon.net.

The Magnetic Residencies artistic committee met on September 24, 2024, and selected artist Racheal Crowther for a residency at Bétonsalon as part of the 3rd edition of this program. Racheal Crowther will be in residence at Bétonsalon for 2 months, from March to April 2024. She will receive a grant of €2,500 per month, accommodation at the Centre international d’échanges des Récollets, a workspace and curatorial support from the Bétonsalon team, as well as networking opportunities with art professionals to develop her research. The residency project Racheal Crowther is interested in the biopolitics that govern the public and private spaces we inhabit, and that constitute their physical and psychological boundaries. She explores the social constructions that underlie the material functions of these spaces, drawing on the social, commercial and institutional environments in which she herself has evolved. In her essay The Eternal Pursuit of the Unattainable (Montez Press, 2024), Racheal Crowther looks at the different uses and representations of perfume, from poison to counterfeit, and its power to influence consumer psychology. She demonstrates how the marketing of perfumes exploits the human yearning for something beyond the ordinary, and explores the issues linked to the socio-economic level that determines access to them, the expression of the gender identities that underpin them, and the history of the acquisition of olfactory materials. During her residency at Bétonsalon, she hopes to deepen her research into olfactory materials by studying the way in which odours are used to influence mood and behaviour, based on studies at the ISIPCA (Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l’Aromatique alimentaire) and the olfactory archives of the Osmothèque de Versailles, the largest conservatory of perfumes in the world.