October 14, 2023–July 6, 2024
In 2023–2024, CAC Brétigny, closed for renovation work, takes its programme off-site. For this transitional season, the art centre transforms into a cultural vessel and accompanies the invited artists and curators as they develop narratives anchored in the local area. Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé, graphic designers in residence since 2016, chart the vessel’s take-off and stops through signs collected from the routes that connect the CAC building with the different spaces in which the programme unfolds.
This journey to meet the inhabitants of different neighbouring areas comes as part of a period of transformation for CAC, which is redesigning its programme both geographically and temporally. Two cycles of exhibitions and residencies, conceived by associate curators Valentina Ulisse and Thomas Maestro, alternate research, co-creation and exhibitions in spaces built at different periods. The artists, like characters from a fantasy saga, travel between the spaces and times. Residencies, exhibitions, performances, workshops… they participate in various ways throughout the different chapters of the season, becoming messengers of a past world yet to be reinvented, interpreters of multiple presents, storytellers of possible futures to be imagined collectively.
This roaming is also an opportunity to deepen the existing uses of CAC Brétigny, historically tied to the area that surrounds it. The team, who already travel the towns and cities of the Cœur d’Essonne Agglomération area alongside the artists-in-residence, continue its explorations this year by adapting the offer of public events. The artistic projects developed by the art centre are characterised by a sensitivity to proximity. They emerge from a strange mix of times and spaces through which the crew travels: curators, artists and the public set off with us on a journey through the region and beyond.
In many science fiction films and novels, the spaceship is central: it travels through the galaxy in search of a habitable planet, becoming itself a society in which we can see the same dynamics of power and domination, collective solidarity and organisation of life together play out. It represents the face of change and transition: an in-between state, at once attached to the past, the creator of its own present and tending towards a future yet to be discovered together. This imaginary context is very close to our current reality, to a world in the throes of an ecological and political transition in which the global and technological order finds itself upended.
With this off-site season, the geographic foothold and the rhythm of the art centre transform. These movements are also those of being in a collective, within and beyond the institution, with members of the team, associate curators, invited artists and the public. Ideas shared within l’Ǝcole, the centre’s space for collective experimentation that brings together users from diverse backgrounds, filter into these ways of working together. The science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that: “Imagination, like all living things, lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires.”[1] Perhaps the same could be said of collective practice. It’s about, then, affording it the time and space necessary to rise from the past, to set it in motion in the present and imagine it in the future.
The CAC Brétigny team
Milène Denécheau, Elisa Klein, Coraline Perrin and Marie Plagnol
Les conjugueuls
Curator: Valentina Ulisse
With Rose-Mahé Cabel, Héloïse Farago, Giorgia Garzilli, Jérôme Girard, Hanna Kokolo, Clara Pacotte, Margot Pietri, Aliha Thalien, Joséphine Topolanski and Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty.
lunulae
Curator: Thomas Maestro
With Ethan Assouline, Célia Boulesteix, Loucia Carlier, Victor Gogly, Collectif Grapain, Louise Hallou, Sandar Tun Tun, Andréa Spartà, Chloé Vanderstraeten and Xolo Cuintle.
The CAC Brétigny is a cultural establishment of Coeur d’Essonne Agglomération. Labeled as a Contemporary Art Center of National Interest, it benefits from the support of the Ministère de la Culture—DRAC Île-de-France, Région Île-de-France and Conseil départemental de l’Essonne, with the complicity of the Brétigny-sur-Orge’s municipality. CAC Brétigny is a member of DCA, TRAM and BLA!.
[1] Ursula K. Le Guin, foreword from Tales from Earthsea, Harcourt, 2001.
