CAC Brétigny

Hugo Béhérégaray
Louis Chaumier
Elise Courcol-Rozès
Juliette George
Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa
Ariadna Guiteras
Jacent (Jade Fourès-Varnier & Vincent de Hoÿm)
Camille Juthier
Bridget Low
Louise Perrussel
Chloé Serre
Marine Zonca

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

“Here, we touch only with our eyes”: this rule, often stated by mediators at the entrance to exhibitions, provokes a good deal of frustration. It imposes a whole set of habits and conventions regulating the ways an exhibition is approached: how it is produced, inhabited, shared. One could even speak of a habitus, to borrow sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term, which designates all of the tendencies that individuals more or less consciously adopt in contact with their social environment. For the 2024—2025 season, CAC Brétigny is overturning all of the exhibition customs: together, we are attempting to free ourselves from the rules that are mechanically applied in contemporary art spaces.

The residencies, exhibitions and off-site events are infused with artistic, educational and collective experiments. This itinerant program, conducive to impermanence, is a continuation of l’Ǝcole, which has been bringing together participants from various backgrounds since 2020, to explore horizontal ways of transmitting practices and knowledge in the visual arts. Entitled “Bascules” (“Seesawing”), this season conceives different ways of learning, and offers a variety of relationships with the works. Special attention is paid to the power relations commonly at play in exhibitions.

Collectively designed by the CAC Brétigny team, “Bascules” started by bringing fluidity into the internal hierarchies. Permanent staff in various posts, along with team members who are doing internships or civilian service, chose to jointly curate this season’s exhibitions and residencies. This decision stems from their shared experience of working in an art center without a director. Since March 2023, CAC Brétigny has been run in a horizontal spirit that involves increased collaboration, something that tends to break down the barriers between our roles (communication, mediation, production, even management). It is through each person’s daily practices, and the experience that collective work implies, that we devised a diverse program in conjunction with the artists.

From September 2024 to July 2025, a series of exhibitions and installations is being presented across the region on sites not dedicated to contemporary art, as well as during local events. Everything has been conceived for the specific context in which it appears, and tries to break free from the codification of the movements, sounds, and gestures in an exhibition. “Bascules” intends to encourage visitor participation and inclusion. This is a matter of giving thought to the place that bodies occupy on exhibition sites, while questioning the effects of the restrictions and standards instituted in those spaces. With the public’s help, we keep transforming the exhibition to adapt it as long as it is used, giving particular consideration to the comfort of the visit. The exhibition is enhanced or reduced according to the desires of visitors, who are encouraged to get their hands on manipulable works, to act upon adjustable installations, to venture into free-practice spaces.

The invited artists joyfully appropriate concepts from design and its history. They explore how objects, spaces and printed mediums are often designed to rationalize our behaviors, by determining the organization of learning and play, work and leisure, solitary activity and common spaces.

Some of them make use of principles linked to affordance, a term that designates the ability of an object or tool to induce an intuitive gesture through its shape. In the field of design, by extension, affordance describes an object’s ability to anticipate or even impose its method of use on users. The artists do quite the opposite, trying to invent non-authoritarian relations with the object-works that they place at the disposal of visitors. With Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa’s works, this is a matter of appropriating them through free gestures, with a view to diverting them from their ordinary functions and imagining multiple, playful, joyful uses. Elise Courcol-Rozès conceives forms that induce potential actions, forms of exchange, or social interactions, leaving a lot of room for shared experimentation.

Others try to break away from contemporary pressures to be productive. They consider the way objects, spaces and mediums affect our behavior. Unlike what ergonomists do, this is not a matter of trying to improve workers’ performance by studying their environment and tools. On the contrary, consideration of the ergonomics of exhibitions and their content is a starting point for formulating open invitations. Louis Chaumier carefully examines how everyday spaces and the knowledge that surrounds them are produced. He transforms standardized environments by bringing tenderness back into them. Juliette George experiments with concrete ways of giving visitors the desire to spend time in exhibition spaces, soliciting their impressions on the comfort of their visit. Hugo Béhérégaray’s works carry traces of their uses, the artist accepting that the exhibition undergoes alteration insofar as people engage with it. Bridget Low and the duo Jacent invite the public into free-practice spaces. The installations they conceive allow everyone to take their time creating autonomously, learning new techniques, or adapting the available furniture and tools, in order to make them into something entirely different.

Finally, educational design and the notion of play furniture open a field of possibilities that can be filled by artistic practices guided by the desire to recreate a space for invention. If one wants to elude assignment to utility, it is quite often enough to say that something is made for children or for play. Louise Perrussel explores returning to children’s jubilatory intuitions, by giving everyone permission to manipulate whatever inspires us with a desire to touch. Camille Juthier creates spaces to inhabit, containing materials that participate in the sensory relationship between the visitors and the works. Ariadna Guiteras reverses the relationship of authority exerted by adults over children, by asking the grown-ups to adapt to the scale of the little ones. Chloé Serre sees play as a way of learning collectively, by appropriating certain codes of communication. Marine Zonca invents other ways of learning, through the appropriation of knowledge by means of mnemonics. These five artists place at everyone’s disposal works inspired by learning-objects, which can be used to shape knowledge according to desires and needs.

The title of the season evokes multifunction objects: the seesaw (balançoire à bascule), the rocking horse (cheval à bascule) and the rocking chair (chaise à bascule). Many designers have designed objects like these: such as Hans Brockhage’s reversible Schaukelwagen chair (circa 1950), which transforms from a rolling car into a chair that can rock back and forth. All of those forms play with balance in the relationship between a body and an object, or between several bodies. On the seesaw, one can take turns rising up into the air, or giving the other person a more or less brutal jump, or find a point of balance together. “Bascules” plays with relations of balance by attempting to create a variety of relationships with the objects, mediums and installations found in the exhibitions.

 

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).

Elise Courcol-Rozès (born in 1992) lives and works in Marseille. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, as well as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her installation, performance and publishing practice is informed by the observation of certain socio-political issues, as well as by research methods in the human sciences. Her work is often rooted in social structures (a prison, a psychiatric hospital, schools) as part of a co-creation approach. She has benefited from support programs and residencies such as Création en Cours (2017), Villa Belleville (2019), Artagon Marseille (2022), and she was awarded the Mécènes du Sud grant in 2022.

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.

Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa (born in 1992), lives and works in Marseille. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 2017. Concerned about the museumification that is rigidifying oral cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, she began conducting collaborative anthropological research in order to create new narratives and common spaces that are welcoming and alive. She works on culture accessibility, and endeavors to build bridges between design and contemporary art through playful activation principles and intuitive affordances, as in MIMO, her first sculptural furniture collection. She has benefited from the support of the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú (2016), the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (2017), the Collection Lambert (since 2022), and the Frac Sud (2023).

Ariadna Guiteras’ practice engages bodies and the relationships that shape them. Starting with performance, she now explores other materials like ceramics and textiles. Her recent work uses strategies such as slow temporalities and collaborative processes to delve into concepts like the dissolution of the child-adult binary and the medieval theory of the “porous body”. She has been an artist-in-residence at Hangar in Barcelona (2015) and Gasworks in London (2019), and her work has been exhibited at venues including CentroCentro in Madrid (2018), Fundació Miró in Barcelona (2019) and The Bower in London (2019).

Jacent, duo formed by Jade Fourès-Varnier and Vincent de Hoÿm (b. 1984), creates large-scale installations inspired by their intimate, domestic lives, where the public is received as a guest. Depending on the context, the duo adapt their multidisciplinary proposals that question the experience within an exhibition. They founded Tonus, a Parisian artist-run space that perpetuates this state of mind. Their work has been presented in solo and group shows at Le SHED, Centre d'art contemporain de Normandie (2022), at the Fondation Boghossian—Villa Empain in Brussels (2023), at One gee in fog in Geneva (2023) and at galerie Crèvecœur in Paris (2024).

Camille Juthier (born in 1990) lives and works between Aubervilliers and Clermont-Ferrand, where she teaches at the École supérieure d’art de Clermont Métropole. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire, she practices sculpture, sensory installation, video, text, and performance. Her practice crosses the fields of crafting and design, in order to produce forms that support alternative histories. In 2023, she was a beneficiary of the FoRTE program with Glassbox Paris, where she completed a residency and presented a solo exhibition. In 2024, she was awarded the Prix Art Ensemble by the Gulbenkian Foundation and the CENTQUATRE-PARIS, and received support from Mécènes du Sud. Exhibitions include the 64^th Salon de Montrouge (2019), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2023) and the Frac Île-de-France (2024).

Bridget Low (born in 1995) lives and works in Marseille where she co-manages Atelier Vé. She is a 2017 graduate of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. She mainly works on tapestry weaving in a lively, colorful universe. She takes inspiration from reality TV, films, and music in American pop culture, which is the source of her characters. She participated in creating the Monstera collective in 2021 alongside artists Delphine Dénéréaz, Léna Gayaud and Opale Mirman. She has exhibited at the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille (2022) and Carré d’Art—Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes (2024).

Louise Perrussel (born in 1998) lives and works in Nantes. She graduated from the École européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne in 2021 and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in 2023. She explores porosities between the inert and the living, between objects, things, and sculpture. Her practice aims to re-evaluate our bodies’ links with the common and discreet objects of everyday life. In 2023, her work was acquired by the Art Delivery library in Nantes. In 2024, she exhibited at Parc de la Gaudinière in Nantes, and participated in the 6th edition of 100% L’EXPO at La Villette in Paris.

Chloé Serre (born in 1986) lives and works in Saint-Etienne. A graduate of the École supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Etienne, she enriches her practice through regular collaborations with live performance artists, as well as through her numerous meetings and co-creation sessions with various members of the public. Through sculptures activated in performances, she explores the rules that underpin human interactions. She participated in the 64^th Salon de Montrouge in 2019, the 19^th Hors Pistes festival at the Centre Pompidou, and several solo and group exhibitions, including at the macLYON (2021), and the Creux de L'Enfer in Thiers (2022).

Marine Zonca (born in 1993) lives and works in Paris. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. Her practice combines sculpture, drawing, and animation, as well as historically situated techniques like fresco, to produce anachronisms. At the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, she conducts research into 19^th-century mnemonic practices. Her work has appeared in several exhibitions, including at KOMMET in Lyon (2020), DOC! in Paris (2020), La Serre in Saint-Etienne (2022) and La Tôlerie in Clermont-Ferrand (2023).