CAC Brétigny

“Bascules”
Off-site season 2024—2025
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team (Zélia Bajaj, Milène Denécheau, Léana Doualot, Esther Gobin-Brassart, Elisa Klein, Danaé Leroy, Coraline Perrin, Marie Plagnol, Ekaterina Tsyrlina)

“Free entrance”
With Hugo Béhérégaray, Louis Chaumier and Juliette George

Château de Morsang-sur-Orge
04.04—26.04.25
Open from Wednesday to Friday, 2:00-6:00 p.m. and on Saturdays and Sundays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. and 2:00-6:00 p.m.

          “Free entrance”: the title of this exhibition is also an indication of the conditions in which its visitors are received. Here, we are free to enter. We understand that admission is free of charge, but more importantly that we are invited to make ourselves comfortable. As we wander through it, we are invited to occupy this multi-use space however we like.

          Hugo Béhérégaray, Louis Chaumier and Juliette George’s propositions take up two rooms of the château de Morsang-sur-Orge between the wedding rooms and the music school. Their eclectic furnishings combine stylistic elements and different types of objects from various periods. By reusing or transforming furniture already at the château and pieces brought in from elsewhere, the artists engage with the architecture and state of the site. Their works invite visitors to appropriate the various elements made available to them. The latter were conceived as opportunities to subvert functions imposed by design. As theorist Claudia Mareis points out, the design of an object, a material or space “always determines, at least in part, the way in which we understand them: [design] not only opens up possibilities for action, it can also reduce them, restrict them or inhibit them altogether[1]”.

          Distributed in the different rooms of the château, a leaflet presents the results of Juliette George’s investigation into the furniture used by around forty art centres in France to display artworks, welcome visitors and accompany visits. Her study implicitly asks what these pieces of furniture allow us to do or prevent us from doing. Art centres are supposed to be accessible and welcoming to everyone. But what about exhibitions presented without comfortable seating? Or with display cases you can only see inside if you’re tall enough? Juliette invites visitors to respond to her study by creating and decorating miniature furniture based on six standard forms identified in her survey. By cutting and assembling cardboard, everyone has the opportunity to imagine diverse pieces of furniture and spaces that suit their desires and needs.

          Louis Chaumier hijacks office furniture, typically associated with productivity. His subtle interventions allow users to adapt the space to their preferred activity. He modifies the legs of the various components of a meeting table from Knoll International's Alessandri range, with its characteristic 1980s lines, rendering them independent. The addition of castor wheels and lamps offers visitors the opportunity to decide the room’s layout. In this way, visitors can bring together the tables when they are designing their furniture models or separate them if they want peace and quiet. Louis also replaces some of the light bulbs in the château's malfunctioning wall lights: once activated, they bear witness to the visitors' passage through the exhibition.

          Hugo Béhérégaray appropriates forms of domestic furniture to create spaces for play: the Chaise musicale (Musical chair) has castor wheels and a keyboard for playing the piano, a coffee table holds the board of a game, while an armchair resembling a “travelling castle” serves both as service cart and storage space. These works encourage us to take up space rather than contain our bodies and behaviour, as is normally the case within exhibitions. Using the forms of familiar objects, Hugo joyfully reinvents their uses, without setting them in stone. The rules of his collaborative game are defined together by imagining the functions of the elements that make up the installation.

          The three artists run counter to the saying “form follows function[2]”, dominant in the history of design. Juliette, Louis and Hugo propose queer uses, as the philosopher Sara Ahmed understands it, as uses deviating from the norm. In her book What's the Use?: On the Uses of Use, she writes: “[...] there is something queer about use; [design] intentions do not exhaust possibilities. The keys that are used to unlock a door can be used as a toy, perhaps because they are shiny and silver; perhaps because they jangle.[3]” By paying particular attention to what is and isn't allowed in a space, according to the way it is designed, set out and inhabited, the three artists adopt a simple principle: opening up possibilities of use for the users, by revealing certain unexpected qualities of furniture. They imagine forms that allow us to deviate from the exhibition’s rules of use.

[1] Claudia Mareis, Théories du design. Une introduction, Dijon, Les Presses du réel, 2023, p.25.

[2] Louis H. Sullivan, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, 1896.

[3] Sara Ahmed, Vandalisme queer, Paris, Burn ~ Août, 2024, p.37-38. This text was first published by Duke University Press in 2019 under the title What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use.

 

Hugo Béhérégaray (born in 1995) lives and works between France and the Netherlands. He is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. He makes portable, participatory, alterable sculptures, stemming from the desire to create an encounter. He uses accessible materials like cardboard to give life and volume to designs that bring common space to life. His work has been presented at Galerie Dohyang Lee in Paris (2021), Vienna Design Week (2023), and the Musée de l’Histoire Vivante in Montreuil with the Frac Île-de-France (2023).

Louis Chaumier (born in 1995) lives and works between Paris and Genillé (Indre-et-Loire). A 2021 graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris, he develops work that aims to disrupt the uses of the objects and spaces that surround us, particularly those that reflect a certain history of progress, growth, and its failures. He has exhibited at Mains d’Œuvres in Saint-Ouen (2021), Bétonsalon—Centre for Art and Research in Paris (2021), and L'Onde Théâtre Centre d'Art in Vélizy-Villacoublay (2023).

After studying literature in Paris, Juliette George (born in 1992) joined the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, from which she graduated in 2021. Her work is mainly based on text, adopting a bureaucratic aesthetic, and drawing on a conceptual heritage. For some time, she has been focusing on material issues in visits, and on questions of mediation from the visitor’s point of view. She has exhibited her work in such places as the Orbeliani Palace in Tbilisi (2021), Mécènes du Sud in Montpellier (2022), and Château de Servières in Marseille (2023). In 2024, she presented her first solo exhibition, Sympathies n°1, at the 3 bis f in Aix-en-Provence, and her work in collaboration with Rodrigue de Ferluc was exhibited in the Georgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.