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.

The artistic committee of the ADAGP / Bétonsalon research grant met on 21 May 2024 and chose Florian Fouché as the 2024 laureate. He is the seventh artist to receive this grant after franck leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir (2022) and artist duo Irma Name (2023). The ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant is a an endowment of €15,000 intended to support an artist in a research project over the course of several months. Bétonsalon – centre for art and research supports the artist in the research and production process. The artist receives €4,000 in fees and €8,000 for production. The artistic project Titled SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE PRÉLUDE [THE PUBLIC HEALTH CARE SYSTEM: A PRELUDE], Florian Fouché’s research is a continuation of the Manifeste Assisté [Assisted Manifesto], a vast investigation on “assisted life“ that is both perceptual and documentary. Begun in 2015, this investigation originates from the care-pathway the artist’s father, Philippe Fouché, received following a stroke that rendered him hemiplegic. From then on, he was accompanied by his son in his everyday life, and became the main protagonist of “actions proches” [close actions] where care roles and assistance positions are redistributed. Over 400 “actions proches“ have been performed and recorded since, featuring about 40 “assistants-assisted actors”. Activated in March 2024 with a first set of works, SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE PRÉLUDE identifies critical links and shared failures between two systems of the French public service: health and art. From the history of the health care system to the threats to the Aide Médicale d’État [Medical State Aid] (which the artist translates as Â.M.E [SOUL]), from administrative phobia to the almost simultaneous closures of the Robert Doisneau nursing home (in the 18th district of Paris) which welcomed Philippe, and the Centre Pompidou in 2025, Florian Fouché seeks to track down the societal mutations which have a concrete effect on bodies, on the scale of individuals and collective imagination. For the ADAGP/Bétonsalon grant, Florian Fouché’s research focuses on different archives from the Kandinsky Library which enable him to link medical and artistic institutions through the history of these places, their architecture, and their mutations. He will look into Vera Cardot and Pierre Joly’s photographic collections, Paul Nelson’s collection on the architectures of artist studios and hospitals, as well as the history of Constantin Brâncuși’s studio. Originally located on Impasse Ronsin in Paris, the studio was destroyed after the artist’s death to welcome a new wing of the Necker Sick Children’s Hospital, before it was reconstructed in 1997 by Renzo Piano in front of the Centre Pompidou, where it is currently located. By analyzing Brâncuși’s epistolary correspondence and photographs of his workplace, Florian Fouché will strive to “identify the ghosts of cared-for children and carers” who might have inhabited the sculptor’s studio and artworks in an underground and anticipatory way. From another perspective, Florian Fouché’s reseach will also focus on the “oblique function”, a concept developed in 1963 by Claude Parent (in collaboration with Paul Virilio) which challenges the orthogonality of urban planning with a new relationship to the inclined plane based on a dynamic of imbalance. This function is echoed in a functional aspect by the PRM (Person with Reduced Mobility) access ramp. This analysis will focus on documents from the Parent collection, relating to his architectural projects such as theatre risers, hospital facilities and nuclear power stations, as well as the derivative use of this ‘function’ proposed by Nicole Parent with the “gymnastics for living” method also known as “inclipan”. Florian Fouché will develop a script for a series of videos in which actors will experiment with the ‘de-functionalisation’ of a PRM ramp and its transformation into an urban public theatre performance space: the “Pèremère [Fathermother] ramp”. All of this research will be used to update the SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE PRÉLUDE project for an exhibition at Bétonsalon in 2025.

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.

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

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.