On the stage of an abandoned television studio, a semblance of Alf¹ lies, suspended in the uncertainty of a possible return to the airwaves. A limp effigy of a somewhat outdated—and controversial—television star, the muppet appears as a rebus of a television activity held in abeyance, awaiting its potential revival. Within a scenography composed of floating textiles produced with the collaboration of Marie Descraques², a studio table made of pizza boxes, a series of screens broadcasting images from the Hibou TV channel and its prime show, abandoned costumes scattered here and there, and an unoccupied technical control room, a liminal environment unfolds, awkwardly inhabited by the familiar figure of the alien. Halfway between a talk-show set and an installation, Jean-Alain Corre’s new proposal at Bétonsalon invites both reverie and action. Caught between the nostalgia of a mass medium facing imminent obsolescence and a desire to invest in and extend the televisual realm, the exhibition presents the remains of the Hibou TV Show³, a phantasmagorical program co-written with author Gaëlle Obiégly, where Alf, a grandmother, a pizza delivery man becoming a TV host, old commercials, news, love, work, and the stars all coexist. By adopting the form of a talk-show —an entirely television format centered on the act of conversation itself (the talk is the show)—Jean-Alain Corre pursues a poetic, fumbling, and chatty exegesis of television. “Hibou TV Show” follows in the footsteps of “public-access television”,  developed by artist collectives in the 1970s, particularly in the United States. The television set becomes both a resonating platform for social and political issues rarely covered by mainstream channels, and a laboratory for experimental forms at the intersection of different media genres⁴. Claiming a certain DIY aesthetic and a playful, irreverent humor, these collectives embrace distortion, disruption, and the scrambling of the video signal. By parodying certain popular programs, spectacularizing artistic performances, and incorporating “off-screen” elements that reveal what goes on behind the scenes and the technical team, they expose the mechanics of image production in all their materiality and visual grammar. 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 lore⁵. This “pocket fund” of television, inherited from a specific era with its joys and alienations, is reappropriated here in a hauntological⁶ 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 field⁷. 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). By drawing on the codes and paradox of proximity inherent to the talk-show, Jean-Alain Corre’s “Hibou TV Show” creates a space to explore the contradictions of our television experiences. He thus continues the work begun by Johnny, a sort of fictional avatar of the artist and “slightly weirdo anti-hero,”⁸ who already multiplied attempts to “keep alive (these) machine(s)”⁹ that shape our daily lives, rhythms, and imaginations. In its determined quest to “transcribe the hazy syncope of a certain era,”¹⁰ the “Hibou TV Show” invites us to delve into the black box of our televisual ghosts, as if to stop skimming the surface and better play with its “promises of sparkle.”¹¹ Vincent Enjalbert, Elena Lespes Muñoz and Émilie Renard

Sandra Lahire (United Kingdom, 1950–2001) was a feminist experimental filmmaker whose work has had a lasting influence on numerous artists and filmmakers, yet remains insufficiently recognized to this day, particularly in France . Like many of her contemporaries in London, she was affiliated with the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a self-organized structure dedicated to the production, exhibition, and distribution of experimental film . Active from the late 1960s onward, the LFMC constituted a key center for a dynamic cinematic movement united by a shared commitment to exploring the materiality of film, notably through direct interventions on the film reel. From the mid-1980s, while continuing her formal investigations into the material properties of the film medium, Lahire incorporated autobiographical and documentary dimensions into her practice. She situated film in constant relation to other forms of matter: human and non-human bodies, landscapes, and the flows that traverse them. Through a wide range of experimental techniques generating stratified, textured surfaces, she gave form to the co-implication of bodies and the physical continuit connecting herself to other living beings—human, animal, and vegetal—conceived as organic and perishable matter. Drawing on her own bodily vulnerability—Lahire suffered from anorexia—her work gives form to what feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo has termed a “transcorporeal space”, in which human corporeality is inextricably bound to the environment through a shared condition of permeability and contamination. The exhibition title, “Overexposed, like an X-rays ”, borrows from the work of American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), whose voice resonates throughout Lahire’s films . While not directly drawn from a specific film by Lahire, the phrase frames the exhibition through an overlapping of entities—Lahire herself, women workers and residents living near nuclear facilities, the film strip, and the earth—subjected to processes that penetrate and erode its material integrity. Under exposure to X-rays, flesh, emulsion, and mineral matter are attacked, hollowed out to their fragile supporting structures. X-rays operates on multiple levels: literally, as a reference to clinical imaging and nuclear radiation; and metaphorically, as an index of the invasive power of medical authority, the military-industrial complex, and, more broadly, the patriarchal, colonial and capitalist system. In Lahire’s films, “exposure” speaks to the material vulnerability of both human and non-human entities, not only as a means of critiquing relations of domination and exploitation, but also as a way of affirming a contingent, porous corporeality inseparable from the material world that constitutes it. This perspective aligns with what Stacy Alaimo, in Exposed, describes as an “ethics of exposure”, grounded in the recognition of our material continuity with our environments. “Dwelling in the dissolve”, as Alaimo suggests, is to acknowledge permeability as the basis for an ethical relationship to the living. The exhibition brings together four key films from the early phase of Lahire’s practice in the 1980s—she would go on to produce ten films between 1984 and 1999. These works trace a progressive expansion of corporeal concerns: from an exploration of her own bodily vulnerability, shaped by anorexia and fostering an empathetic relationship to other living beings, to an engagement with environments affected by the invisible toxicity of nuclear radiation, power plants, and uranium mining. The first two films, Arrows (1984) and Edge (1986), approach film as a body—as a “skin” (Laura Marks)—establishing parallels between cinematic editing and surgical procedures through a deliberately discontinuous montage. They also introduce the figure of the animal, tracing a shift from metaphor — the animal as image of freedom — toward an acknowledgment of shared suffering. Lahire draws connections between the objectified female body within dominant representational regimes—extended through invasive medical practices—and the animal subjected to human domination, both fragmented into slices, evoking Sylvia Plath’s expression of “pathological salamis”, cited in Edge. Terminals (1986) and Serpent River (1989) respectively open and conclude a series of four anti-nuclear films. Terminals examines the working conditions of women in a nuclear power plant and their exposure to radiation. Its title refers both to monitoring interfaces—pervasive instruments of control—and to the terminal stages of illness. The image is held at the threshold of disappearance, as though the film itself were subjected to the same radiative forces as the bodies it depicts. Serpent River, the final work in a trilogy shot in Serpent River, Ontario (Canada), addresses the ecological and human consequences of uranium mining by the multinational Rio Tinto Zinc. Lahire renders perceptible the otherwise invisible toxicity of radiation as it circulates—fluid, diffuse, and chromatic—across mined landscapes, through living streams, into human bodies, and onto the filmic surface itself, whose textures and colors evoke the entanglement of bodies and the substances that permeate them. Across these works, bodily fluids, blood circulation, underground waters, and tidal movements converge into a shared substrate of contaminated matter. The materiality of film mirrors the entanglements it articulates: the filmmaker’s body, those of local inhabitants, the depths of the earth, the filmic medium, and the spectators are bound together in a shared vulnerability.. Lahire thereby suggests that an awareness of the mutual porosity of bodies and environments—and of their interdependent fragility—may constitute the foundation for an ecofeminist ethics grounded in embodiment, challenging Western conceptions of the subject as fixed, bounded, and autonomous. The exhibition design is conceived by artist Jagna Ciuchta, whose practice–characterized by processes of permeability, contamination, and the incorporation of other artists’ works– extends and reactivates key gestures and motifs present in Lahire’s cinema.

A media theorist, filmmaker, cyberfeminist, navigator of seas and internets, Nathalie Magnan (1956–2016) contributed in a transdisciplinary, vibrant and generous way to the history of thought, media and technologies, feminism, and LGBTQI+ struggles. A teacher, webmistress, hacktivist, and artist—though she never claimed that title—Nathalie Magnan played a crucial role as a connector between geographic scenes, intellectual and activist communities, and disciplinary fields that rarely intersect or enter into dialogue. Favouring collective work, with feminist and rhizomatic methodologies in which do-it-yourself practices were both empowering and contagious, Nathalie Magnan consistently worked toward collecting, bringing together and intersecting images, texts, people, struggles and machines. As a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1980s, she worked as an assistant to philosopher and historian of science Donna Haraway, and later translated into French Haraway’s seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto. Nathalie Magnan was also involved in the public-access television collectives Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Television. After returning to France in the 1990s, she directed several films, including Lesborama for Canal+’s first Nuit Gay in 1995. A co-founder and for a time president of the Paris Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (now Chéries-Chéris), and a contributor to the magazine Gai Pied, she later became a professor at the École nationale supérieure d’art in Dijon, and subsequently in Bourges. Deeply engaged in cyberfeminist, tactical media and hacktivist circles, Nathalie Magnan organised digital counterculture events, moderated feminist mailing lists, coded websites, wrote and translated texts, and coordinated collective publications. In 2000, in response to the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) held in Paris without a single woman speaker, she organised an ISEA Off event in a women-only format at the Information and Documentation Centre of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2004 and 2005, in Finland and later in the Strait of Gibraltar, she organised two sea crossings entitled Sailing for Geeks, bringing together artists and activists around communication technologies, thereby drawing a parallel between sailing at sea and navigating the web. Nathalie Magnan passed away at the age of sixty following metastatic breast cancer. She leaves behind a legacy of struggles around gender and technologies, incisive reflections on how media shape our worldviews, a deep belief in each individual’s agency to produce their own representations, a participatory methodology of inquiry, and a sharp sense of humour. Many of those who knew her wonder what she would have thought, written, or done in relation to our present moment: social networks to which we entrust our intimate lives and data; a pandemic that has reshaped our relationships to distance and vulnerability; the possibilities of artificial intelligence; mainstream media controlled by the far right; and genocides broadcast live in the palms of our hands. Many are also deeply engaged with her archival collection, deposited at the Archives de la critique d’art in Rennes by her partner Reine Prat—a collection that joyfully blurs the boundaries between private and professional life, institutional culture and self-organisation, activism and transmission, reshuffling the deck of disciplines, genders and questions of legitimacy. The exhibition is not intended merely as a portrait or a tribute, but rather as a collective biography open to the present—one in which the thinking, struggles and bridges that Nathalie Magnan created resonate across different generations of artists and thinkers.