à propos/about

[fr]

Matière-revue est un collectif d'art qui revisite les notions d'oeuvre, d'exposition et de savoir à la manière intempestive d'un bricoleur.

Nous envis­ageons la créa­tion artis­tique comme résul­tant d’une pra­tique col­lec­tive d’appropriation, de détourne­ment et de fal­si­fi­ca­tions des idées et des procé­dures qui com­posent notre vie con­crète. Pour nous, la créa­tion con­siste ainsi à dis­poser dans une sit­u­a­tion expéri­men­tale nos habi­tudes quo­ti­di­ennes ainsi que cer­tains objets aux­quels nous attribuons un sens stable.

En ce qui concerne la pratique curatoriales, nous ne l'envisageons pas comme un champ neutre, mais comme une démarche qui prétend nécessairement modifier les significations propres à la matière qu’elle présente. Il s’agit ainsi d’une activité potentiellement inventive, nourrie par une réflexion que vise à interroger les conditions de réception d'une oeuvre.

Par la circulation de savoirs, nous la comprenons comme un exercice théorique collectif d’inscription critique de notre contemporanéité dans un compréhension plus élargie de histoire de l’art. L’idée étant de décrypter dans certains enjeux de la tradition artistique ce qui peut nous aider à avancer sur des problématiques contemporaines.

[en]
Matière-revue is an art collective that revisits the notions of work, exhibition and knowledge in the untimely manner of a handyman.

We see artistic creation as the result of a collective practice of appropriation, diversion and falsification of the ideas and procedures that make up our concrete life. For us, creation thus consists of placing our daily habits and certain objects to which we attribute a stable meaning in an experimental situation.

As far as curatorial practice is concerned, we do not see it as a neutral field, but as an approach that necessarily claims to modify the meanings specific to the material it presents. It is thus a potentially inventive activity, nourished by a reflection that aims to question the conditions of reception of a work.

Through the circulation of knowledge, we understand it as a collective theoretical exercise of critical inscription of our contemporaneity in a broader understanding of art history. The idea being to investigate aspects of the artistic tradition that can help us to advance on contemporary questions.

From September 2016 to December 2017 our collective was invited to hold a workshop within the temporary occupation of the Saint-Vincent de Paul Hospital in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, as part of the Grands Voisins project. We had the opportunity to work on the issues that animated our project in a space open to the daily passage of visitors. We decided to transform our workshop into an experimental laboratory inhabited by employees with various backgrounds. This laboratory takes shape fundamentally through the following activities: conferences, exhibitions, workshops, radio broadcasts and theatrical research.

Our move in January 2018 to Cachan - a southern suburb of Paris - was a fundamental turning point in our project. We decided to live together and set up our artistic research laboratory in the heart of our house. This consisted in a place of work, but also of living together, where questions about our artistic practices were directly crossed by questions about living together. We thus transformed our house into a model of a factory oriented towards artistic creation. The spaces originally designed for the layout of private life - garage, dining room and kitchen, cellar, garden and terrace - were frequently misappropriated.The spaces of our house, with their versatile character, were thus places of collective self-construction where continuous and simultaneous processes of formation and deformation of structures were in progress, always open to new appropriations and do-it-yourself projects.