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.