Le fil d’alerte (The alert wire)

Artists: Marcos Ávila Forero, Eva Barto, Simon Boudvin, Corentin Canesson, Gaëlle Choisne, Kapwani Kiwanga, Paul Maheke, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Sarah Tritz

Curator: Claire Le Restif

Referring as it does to the thread that links the spider to its web and lets it know when an event has just occurred, this title is a metaphor for the curator’s relationship with her environment. It also evokes the attention we give to a context, dynamically and alertly.

The question raised by the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Prize exercise is rewarding because it proposes to distinguish the work of artists as so many promises. I myself have chosen to answer it by providing a snapshot of the multiplicity of voices being expressed, testifying to the vitality of the French art scene and the strength of the debates it raises.

It welcomes all practices and all forms of plastic expression, from painting to performance, from sculpture to furtive works, from drawing to photography and video, without any hierarchy—quite the contrary.

All of the artists who make up Le fil d’alerte are attentive to the world and activate consciousness through sensitive and activist gestures. In music we would say it is polyphonic, that is, it assembles voices without prejudging their nature. Their artistic projects convey precise positions, whether they be that of the anthropologist-artist, the activist, the smuggler, the researcher, the evoker or the critic, for whom orality, ecology, the colonisation of territories and/or bodies, the cosmological vision of the world, identities, feminism, economics and the queer have a stake in their work.

But it can also be said that some of them also endeavour to get away from these concepts, which they view as restrictive categories whose contours the artistic work seeks to redraw.

Although it is not set up as thematic group exhibition, since the exhibition context raises a completely different type of question, Le fil d’alerte will be, I hope, a choral exhibition (stemming from a spiral vision) that establishes “community.”

–Claire Le Restif