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.

The 2nd-year students of the ArTeC’s master’s programme invite you to their graduates’ exhibition, a vibrant celebration of research and creation in all its forms. This unique moment stands out thanks to the multiplicity of media and approaches, which reflect deeply personal artistic gestures inscribed in intimate paths of reflection and research. Each exhibited project traces singular trajectories through research-creation, making this exhibition impossible to define beyond its conceptual umbrella. Research and creation can take many forms here: plastic, motionless, performed, visual, spiritual, written or danced. The devices on display shift our gaze and invite us to explore a subtle theory, everywhere yet often invisible. How do we combine research and creation? What role does theory play in an exhibition?

In today’s Western societies, sport has taken such an important role in our daily lives that it has become more than a form of individual or collective leisure, or a determined regular physical activity. It now permeates our everyday, its wordage impregnating our speech, from “how are you doing, champ ?” as hellos to “it’s a marathon, not a sprint, keep going !” as words of encouragement clearly borrowed from racing. Even in the workplace, it has become synonymous with success. A company will insist on “performance”, “personal records” and “team victories”. If sport is first strictly defined as all the types of physical activity that people do to keep healthy or for enjoyment (Cambridge dictionary), it also conveys a culture of heroism, of surpassing yourself, but also others. However, it is clear that its agonistic tendencies have also invaded our lives. German economist and sociologist Max Weber already highlighted in his writings how passions for wealth had all the characteristics of a sport, as they were inhabited by the logic of combat, competition and performance. Sport has become a widespread part of existence, and is now present outside sport : ‘used as a referent, metaphor or principle of action in ever wider areas of our contemporary reality, sport has left the stadiums and gymnasiums, it has left the restricted framework of sporting practices and shows : it is a system of self-management that consists of involving the individual in the formation of his autonomy and responsibility.¹” Idiom taken from English, “Keep your spirits up” perfectly fits into this idea of sporting incentive turned into a life mantra. Borrowed from one of Sylvie Fanchon’s paintings – whose exhibition “SOFARSOGOOD” will be used as the framework of this project which brings together artistic performance and sports -, this expression conveys both the driving force of enthusiastic momentum, for oneself but also for others, and the paradoxical injunction to do well at all costs, to be in shape only. Keep Your Spirits Up! brings together a group of artists who all practice performance and share a desire to explore through their work the notions of effort, limitation, fatigue, but also of rest, retreat, exertion and strike, as well as the societal injunctions to stay optimistic and on course. Each in their own way, they summon, divert and question this culture of heroism inherited from sport. And while in the contemporary visual arts, performance art generally refers to an action being performed in the presence of an audience, the word also designates a form of accomplishment, of success, in short a kind of victory… But what about artistic performances that resist and offer an alternative to performance, to the ordeal? This is what this programme proposes to explore by inviting artists to exchange with athletes to better question wellness culture and its capitalistic spiral. What place is there for out-of-time, non-performing, inefficient bodies? How can an exhausted body that refuses to perform and resists injunctions to surpass itself also offer new possibilities for thinking about the collective, interdependence and attention to oneself and others? Elena Lespes Muñoz