On the stage of an abandoned television studio, a semblance of Alf^¹ 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 A limp effigy of a somewhat outdated—and controversial—television star, the muppet appears as a rebus of a television activity held in abeyance, awaiting its potential revival.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^², 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 Show^³, 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 genres^⁴. 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 shows (Tournez Manège, Le Juste Prix, Le Bigdil), afternoon movies (Sister Act, Ghost), series and sitcoms (Beverly Hills, Premiers baisers, Hartley, cœurs à vif), as well as old-fashioned commercials. Together, these materials contribute to expanding and enriching Jean-Alain Corre’s lore^⁵. This “pocket fund” of television, inherited from a specific era with its joys and alienations, is reappropriated here in a hauntological^⁶ 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).

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