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.

This summer, Bétonsalon is offering an artistic, sporting and festive programme based around listening, with sound walks, radio workshops, performances, karate sessions, concerts and an environmental concert. This programme of sound arts offers sensitive experiences that appeal to the whole body, not just the sense of hearing. Through collective experiences such as urban walks guided by listening, the practice of a martial art, sound experiments ranging from the scale of crumpled paper to that of a river, this programme will invite us to explore our capacities for attention, to exercise our listening skills and to experience altered states of consciousness. Through a wide range of practices, we’ll be able to become more aware and less selective, turning our attention to the slightest sounds, to sound fluctuations, attentive to the most inarticulate noises that will be heard in the midst of vast soundscapes. These collective practices will enable us to connect with our own inner state, with others and with the environment. Bétonsalon opens up a time when the whole body will be mobilised, and when, little by little, the focus of our eyes and ears will fade away to make way for other perceptions; it opens up a space where we can let our ears hang out in the sun.

The artistic committee of the ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant met on 22 May 2023 and chose the duo Irma Name (Hélène Déléan and Clément Caignart) as the laureates. They are the sixth artists to benefit from this grant after Franck Leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021) and Abdessamad El Montassir (2022). The ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant is an endowment of €20,000 intended to support an artist in a research project over several months. Bétonsalon – center for art and research supports the artist in the research and production process. The artist receives €5,000 in fees and €10,000 for production. Working from the archives of the Archizoom Associati collective, Irma Name looks at the notion of critical counter-utopia developed by this group of Florentine architects and designers between 1966 and 1974. BOT (BETWEEN OTHER THINGS) Archizoom developed the No-Stop City project (1969), a model of global urbanisation based on the organisation of a factory or supermarket, which questions the relevance of a world saturated with objects and proposes a new relationship with space emancipated from all geometric reference points. Their last project, a short-lived cooperative of architects and artists entitled Global Tools (1973-1975), was a counter-school of architecture based on the use of natural and artificial materials and the development of individual creative activities. The members of Archizoom saw the space of transmission as the first stone in the construction of a political gesture. With the starting point that the utopias and counter-utopias of the 1970s are being re-examined in the form of techno-utopias, where institutions that have become dependent on the digital are gradually migrating towards metaverses, Irma Name will be developing the BOT (Between Other Things) project during this research and production residency. Assuming that the archive of an artistic and educational experiment conducted by Bétonsalon has disappeared, they are imagining a group of researchers and artists commissioned to reconstruct this history and its missing elements, by reconstituting the sensory environment of the site. Urban planners, sociologists, activists, students and artists will come together in a fictional field study, in the style of an anticipation story. There will be tension as they attempt to recreate a new immersive artistic experience inspired by the previous one. This research will result in the production of a video installation that will question the new methods of production and circulation of artistic content in virtual and computational worlds. It will engage with the issues, fantasies and fears linked to the inexorable development of virtual reality technologies, so-called artificial intelligence and generative agents in a near-future fictional world. Artistic commitee 2023 Julien Ribeiro, artist and curator Lauren Tortil, artist affiliated to ADAGP Abdessamad El Montassir, artist, laureate of the 2022 grant Mica Gherghescu, head of research and scientific programs, Bibliothèque Kandinsky Émilie Renard, director of Bétonsalon The ADAGP / Bétonsalon research and production grant This grant is intended to allow an artist to develop a research project over several months on questions of representation, production and circulation of images, based on one or more photographic collections of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky that they can identify. These reflections can belong to the field of art – rereading of art histories, exploration of ignored and marginalized life paths, composition of new artistic lineages, etc. – but also in the very materiality of photographic images – their making, archiving, reproduction, exhibition and multiple forms of circulation.

Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok… there are many social networks that are part of our daily lives today, particularly of young teenagers through their use of smartphones. They chat, exchange photos and videos, voice their opinions, share their daily lives, get training and information through tutorials, for example. Their infatuation with these networks is not insignificant, and while the media and health professionals have rightly portrayed the risks and excesses, it has to be said that the “it was better before” attitude does not help to understand or raise awareness among young people of what they are doing and experiencing on the web. With this project, Gwendal Coulon proposes to use social networks as a medium and support for artistic and critical experimentation. Through practice, dialogue and misappropriation, the aim is to use one of these media to question its use, both individually and collectively, and to explore its creative potential. Photos, videos, statuses, profiles, hashtags, POV (Point of View) … allow young teens to express, test and probe multiple facets of themselves, while feeling part of a community. Telling one’s story, playing up one’s identity, measuring one’s popularity, assessing one’s place in a peer group and beyond … are just as much issues common to social networks as, more broadly, to the construction of self in adolescence. Through a series of workshops and visits, the artist and participants will work together to create an avatar: this fictitious, highly anonymous character will be the result of a collective, plural cross-dressing, as well as the group’s many exchanges and experiments. It will be a tool designed and created for and by the group to examine and test its relationship with social networks. A veritable digital masquerade, it will be first and foremost a way of experiencing JOMO (Joy of missing out), as opposed to FOMO (fear of missing out), which has long characterized the feeling of inferioritý of social network users who feel that, unlike the lives seen and liked on the social media, their own is dull and boring. It’s a question of analyzing and freeing ourselves from the idealized lives portrayed by the networks, and instead choosing to slow down and listen to our own needs. Different trends, #memes and remixes, via sport, fashion and music, will be critically and inventively invested by the group with the aim of thinking about this avatar, its identity and its fictitious life; all with humor, generosity, exaggeration, artificiality, theatricality and even eccentricity.

“Tu vois je veux dire” is an artistic and cultural education project run by Bétonsalon – centre for art & research (Paris, 13th arrondissement), 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. The project takes as its starting point the “Young Mediators Programme” developed by Bétonsalon’s Outreach team, a space for dialogue and transmission built around the exhibitions and their interpretation. With “Tu vois je veux dire”, the three cultural venues deployed the program together, sharing and experimenting with high-school students various forms of visit and sharing around artistic practices in the visual and performing arts. Through observation, listening, encounters with artists and art professionals, dialogue and artistic practice, the project helped to overturn the roles and voices traditionally associated with discourse on works of art within cultural and artistic institutions, by imagining and inventing original ways of accompanying the public: podcasts, a dancing tour, the design and graphic production of an exhibition booklet, and so on. Students from three high school classes have been sharing and experimenting with new ways of doing and carrying mediation during the 2023-2024 school year around Sylvie Fanchon’s “SOFARSOGOOD” exhibition on show at Bétonsalon from May 3 to July 13, 2024. Each class has designed an original visiting format that will be shared by students during a visit for peers at the restitution on Monday afternoon, May 27. A convivial afternoon of encounters and exchanges with: • A dancing visit by the Terminale CAP Signage and graphic design students, conceived with choreographer Valéria Giuga, the support of Arina Dolgikh from La Briqueterie and their sport teacher Virginie Raynal. • A serie of podcasts imagined by the 2nd 9 students written and recorded with writer and director Hélène Carbonnel, with the support of Lucia Zapparoli from Crédac and their literature teacher Pierre Dammame. The podcasts are available for free listening on the Crédac Radio platform. • The exhibition diary created by the 2nd 6 students with Félixe Kazi-Tani, Léna Salabert-Triby and Roxanne Maillet from the Bye Bye Binary collective, with the support of Elena Lespes Muñoz from Bétonsalon and their Arts teachers Margot Jayle and Nathalie Cornaz. “Tu vois je veux dire” is an artistic and cultural education project run by Crédac, Bétonsalon and la Briqueterie in collaboration with teachers Pierre Dammame, Margot Jayle and Virginie Raynal from the Adolphe Chérioux highschool in Vitry-sur-Seine, with support from the Région Île-de-France.

Bétonsalon welcomes Russian curator Lev Shusharichev for a research residency between September and November 2023, as part of the Institut Français de Russie’s artistic residency fellowship program. The project (no)compromise Over the course of his research residency, Lev Shusharichev aims to study the strategies used by artists and art workers, who have to navigate between personal expression and market demands, independence and institutions, state presence and societal opinion. He is interested in the way sociopolitical factors influence aesthetic choices. The goal of this stage of his research will be to map the main centres between which contemporary art players balance themselves today. Lev Shusharichev’s approach combines sociological and artistic methods. His research material will be collected through individual interviews and surveys. Bétonsalon accompanies him in the selection of his interviewees and for the restitution of his research, which will take the form of an article and a performative performance, presenting a typology of creative compromises.