Curatorship: Manuel Pomar, artistic director of Lieu Commun.

Lieu-Commun, an extension of ALaPlage (Toulouse, since 1997) and La Station (Nice, since 1996) swap!

After Season 17, an exhibition of La Station at Lieu Commun, it is now up to the Toulouse structure to come over to the Riviera.

The title of the exhibition Some Kind of a New Departure is extracted from the Diabologum song « De la neige en été » (« Some Snow in Summer »). Singer and author Michel Cloup describes to us in an opaque manner, on a screeching and throbbing guitars phrasing, a world falling prey to chaos. The snow in the title is nothing other than the foam of the fire extinguisher used in vain to try to suffocate fires, which sporadically set the city ablaze. A disillusioned observation in which this « new departure » is an idea barely sketched. Both narrators are content with playing soccer on the roof of a building absent-mindedly contemplating the scattered fires.

The art will probably not change the world but it continues its journey, and led by its rotating momentum, it undergoes its galloping evolution. Some of the guest artists for this exhibition worked several times with ALaPlage and Lieu-Commun but it is also an opportunity for a first encounter with artists arousing our curiosity. Not adding objects or the aesthetics of decrement could be the rules of this exhibition. The artworks presented propose aesthetics radically different from one another. Their common points are rather located in the means of production of the works, recycled or diverted objects, the subtraction of materials to the premises, ephemeral productions or the use of natural materials show the diversity of the practices situated as a counterpoint to an excessive and gleaming art in total contradiction with the our world’s realities.

Pictures of the exhibition