With its modular staging, deeply collaborative nature, and flexible programming schedule, Hibou TV chanel aims to be cumulative and self-reflective. It features videos co-produced with children, families, students from Émile Levassor elementary school (Paris, 13th arrondissement), students and staff from Paris Cité University and the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris Cergy, as well as the Bétonsalon team. Alongside these videos, other formats—capsules, test patterns, AI-generated cartoons—activate a shared imagination of popular television. They include references to iconic french show (Tournez Manège, Le Juste Prix, Le Bigdil), afternoon movies (Sister Act, Ghost), series and sitcoms (Beverly Hills, Premiers baisers, Heartbreak High), as well as old-fashioned commercials. Together, these materials contribute to expanding and enriching Jean-Alain Corre’s lore. This “pocket fund” of television, inherited from a specific era with its joys and alienations, is reappropriated here in a hauntological and sensitive approach.

These collective productions will be presented in the exhibition space and streamed online. The choice of a second broadcast channel, such as Twitch, where active communities gather around formats derived from television—serves a dual purpose: to infiltrate an existing network by playing with its codes and to encourage a form of direct interaction with online audience through the logic of feedback (and instant online commenting), which lie at the core of the ‘televisualities’ explored in the artistic field^⁷. Behind this technological evolution, however, a shift in affect becomes apparent : yesterday’s popular shows seem to inhabit, even haunt, today’s audiovisual productions, in a nostalgic movement — whether real or feigned — blurred by the mirages that artificial intelligence generates from these memory vestiges floating in our minds.

With Hibou TV, Bétonsalon becomes the stage for a resolutely open talk-show, where improvisation plays a central role. Uncompromising in the collective dimension of his approach, Jean-Alain Corre also invites the Bétonsalon team to take to the stage. In a joyfully chaotic horizontality, everything that happens at Bétonsalon can—or must?—lend itself to the game of television staging: conferences, surveys, meetings, workshops, tours, etc., thereby undermining the established hierarchies between what is presented in the art center and what unfolds off-screen in the institution. Hosted by non-professional actors and other excited TV enthusiasts, Hibou TV explores the malleability of roles and the dynamics of collective learning. Through this prism, our programs are reconfigured, our positions readjusted between the audience, the set, and behind the scenes, seeking new forms of redistribution. The aim is to produce amateur shows and perform them with seriousness, in order to discover in return the distorting mirror of our own organizations and projections. Playing at doing television will be as important as the images produced (the making is the show).

This exhibition is conceived with the support of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) through its artistic project funding programme, and with the participation of the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), Université Paris Cité, the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle (ENSCI – Les Ateliers), and the Émile Levassor Primary School (Paris, 13th arrondissement).