La Station - Nice - France
From 03-24-2017 to 03-06-2017
Opening informations : Friday, March 24, 2017, at 6 PM
LE BATIMAN ET A NOU
An exhibition by NICOLAS DAUBANES
OPENING on Friday, March 24, 2017, at 6 PM
EXHIBITION from Saturday March 25, to Saturday June 3, 2017.
In parallel with the exhibition Go Canny! Poétique du sabotage at Villa Arson (from February 10 to April 30, 2017), Nicolas Daubanes invades the spaces of La Station around a proposal entitled Le batiman et a nou (« The bilding iz orz »).
Under this inflated title like the punchlines of the famous French rappers, the ideology of sabotaging down is spread. A form of reappropriation and invective, « le batinam et a nou » originally comes from a graffiti made by someone in the jail of Nanterre. Photographed then pinned in the office of the deputy director, it expresses as much the intrepid retort of prisoners facing authority and the absence of all freedoms as the irony and condescension of a bureaucracy comfortably settled down and sometimes humiliating.
Multiplying the interventions in prisons, Nicolas Daubanes has become an expert in discrete sabotage, in the image of his key made in ceramics supposed to open the women’s quarter of the Baumettes prison and pass the security gates. Split in small pieces, it bears in itself the potential of an edge weapon and the hope of an escape, once all the elements are reunited. A condition necessary to « save one’s skin », sabotage calls for eminently practical knowledge like Greek mètis once did. This form of intelligence, calling for infiltration or transformation of the materials and tools, also allows Nicolas Daubanes to combine surveillance devices with sabotage strategies; as far as ontaining the secret plans of a prison, in order to build its panoptic tower with sweetened concrete. (…)
Nathalie Desmet and Mario Zilio (curators – with Eric Mangion – of the exhibition Go Canny! Poétique du sabotage)
La Station thanks la Villa Arson, Nathalie Desmet, Marion Zilio as well as Marion Mounic and Hugo Bel for their support.
In parallel with the exhibition Le batiman et a nou, La Station welcomes a work of art by Laurent Lacotte made in the course of the exhibition Go Canny! Poétique du sabotage: Upgrade, 2017 (gold spray paint on the top of the 792 pickets of the fence of the former slaughterhouse of the city of Nice)
