Romain Grateau Grand tourisme à injection, 2021 Reinforced concrete bookcase: Portland cement, sand, mineral fillers, steel, oxides and pigments, encaustic, 300 x 215 x 35 cm. Photo : © DR. An in situ work that will store the collection of books and documents of Bétonsalon, this bookcase by Romain Grateau is a knowing pun on the art centre’s name, a literalized vision of the form that un salon en béton [a concrete living-room] might take. A self-supporting structure, the bookcase extends and appropriates the functional architecture of the space through its modulation of horizontal lines and support modules. Combining tapered and squat columns with slightly skewed modules whose forms are at once rough and delicate, the different processes used to create this unit are clearly visible in the finished piece, offering a multiplicity of possible variations upon a material that is usually synonymous with standardized industrial production. Grateau plays with numerous densities, colourings, finishes and embedded elements, challenging our perception and our ability to separate rubble from art object. By combining careful touches of ornamentation with the heavy-duty techniques of construction, he blends genres and registers from masonry to self-build and from Rocaille to brutalism. The title of the work, drawn from the world of automobiles, refers to a technology that allows vehicles to travel long distances at high speeds. Grateau’s bookcase invokes this mixture of poetry, precision, power and mechanics, whilst subverting a form of masculinity anchored in bodily exertion and physical feats.   Mathilde Belouali   Sylvie Fanchon BONJOURSINOUSDISCUTIONS, 2021-… Series of 10 sentences in Blanc de Meudon on Bétonsalon’s windows Commission « oeuvre in situ », Bétonsalon — Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, 2021-2025. Photo : Marc Domage, © Galerie Maubert et Adagp, Paris, 2025. Daubed in whitewash, the four windows at one end of Bétonsalon’s glass façade are transformed into a pictorial surface. One after another, ten enigmatic phrases will be etched out within the whitewash in a standard font, devoid of any punctuation and rendered in tightly packed lettering. Over the course of the exhibition, Bétonsalon’s team will trace out a new phrase as each previous one is worn away. The short affirmations that make up this work by painter Sylvie Fanchon are uttered by Cortana, an intelligent voice assistant developed by Microsoft in the 2010s that is still in use despite already having been made obsolete. Toeing the line between politeness and pushiness, invitation and imperative, Cortana attempts to make itself useful (IMHERETOHELPDOYOUNEEDANYTHING), to engage users in conversation (HELLOHOWABOUTACHAT) or to improve their productivity (ICANREMINDYOUOFIMPORTANTTHINGSANDMUCHMORE), whilst at the same time warning them not to get too familiar (PLEASEDONTPROVIDEANYPRIVATEINFORMATION). Its limitations nonetheless soon become apparent (IMSORRYIDONTUNDERSTAND). This simple yet already unintelligible language is characteristic of the straightforward and one-dimensional relationships offered by artificial intelligence assistants, which, beneath a helpful and servile veneer, gather information to increase technology companies’ profits and power. Fanchon’s pictorial production is based on pre-existing elements drawn from language and visual culture. Here she uses Cortana, a device at once intrusive, dystopian and comical, as a source of motifs for her paintings and in situ interventions. Facing out over the esplanade in front of Bétonsalon, eliciting questions and curiosity, Cortana’s invitations and their apparent authority are contrasted with the fragility and transparency of the surface on which they are inscribed. Mathilde Belouali  

Can you write about art with mittens? Having your hands full of plaster? Having you nose to the grindstone? What does the color of the exhibition floor, a rumbling stomach, boredom or the bus ride to get here do to our perception of artworks? How to write without passion? How do we write about things we don’t understand? Is there not always a moment when we say too much ? These are questions that we will not answer in this workshop, but perhaps we will only try to answer them, or if not, ask other questions. This workshop is for all those who have insomnia writing about and around art, come and share your words.

Bétonsalon is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023: 20 years of exhibitions, productions of works, performances, seminars and colloquiums, original texts and new translations, discussions, encounters, workshops, and unlisted initiatives that have been developed and supported by many people. Even though the institution has changed internally, what is our history and identity today? How can we, having arrived here relatively recently, represent the history of the institution and, in turn, tell it? How can we go through the history of the art centre, and create a collective memory that is open to reading and writing? How can we position Bétonsalon in the world of art institutions in France and worldwide? After 20 years, the time has come to look back at this institution, to initiate a process of self-reflection to draw up current perspectives, informed by past experiences and by these manifold histories. Working together, we will gradually delve into the history of Bétonsalon and Villa Vassilieff in a spirit of research and experimentation, with a critical and reflective approach, we will create our methodology by observing those explored here, collecting micro-histories and counter-histories, personal or collective statements, to enable us to re-establish links and even extend certain experiences. On the basis of a meeting for each exhibition, every three months, we will progressively and over several years, carry out a case-by-case interpretation of Bétonsalon. Project by project, we will gradually open the paper and digital archives, and we will search the documentary collection for publications associated with each project. And because the memory of a place, like the history of art, must be comprised of the memories of the people who have animated it, we will call upon the people concerned who initiated, animated or simply passed through such and such a project, seeking to open up this exploration to all the “stakeholders” (Parties prenantes is the title of a 2009 exhibition) according to their affinities: volunteers from previous teams, individual, collective or associative players, artists, curators, the public, partners, students, professionals, university staff, residents, children, walkers, dog owners, shopkeepers… For us, it will be a time of self-reflective research, in motion, with a view to re-constituting the archives and a living memory.

ADAGP – French Society of Authors in the Visual Arts and Bétonsalon – centre for art and research (Paris), in partnership with Kandinsky Library (Paris) The artistic committee of the ADAGP–Bétonsalon Grant met on 9 June 2026 and selected Elsa Brès as this year’s recipient. She is the ninth artist to receive the grant, following Franck Leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir (2022), le duo Irma Name (2023), Florian Fouché (2024) et No Anger (2025). The ADAGP–Bétonsalon Research Grant is an award of €15,000 intended to support an artist undertaking a research project over several months. Bétonsalon will accompany Elsa Brès throughout the research and production process. The artist receives a €4,000 fee and €8,000 towards production costs. The artistic project A History of Holes A History of Holes explores the rural underground worlds on whose edges Elsa Brès lives, as well as the stories that inhabit them, with the aim of opening up minoritarian perspectives on History through collective storytelling practices. Natural and excavated underground cavities emerge as spaces where temporalities, species, and forms of life become entangled. The project will be informed by research into the archives of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a Mexican collective founded in 1937 whose practices intersect political struggles, rural cultures, and popular narratives. A History of Holes shares with these practices a concern for the circulation of stories, their material forms, and their capacity to create common spaces. Beneath the limestone plateau of the Causses lies a vast network of caves, sinkholes, cavities, and galleries. These places have been crossed, inhabited, or shaped by a multitude of lives: resistant peasants, heretical communities, hidden populations, dissident practices, and other seemingly vanished worlds. Rather than distinguishing fact from legend or rumour, the project seeks to collectively explore what their coexistence produces: a dense, stratified temporality in which different times and forms of presence persist and may continue to act together. In contrast to narratives based on rootedness and continuity, A History of Holes approaches territory through its depth and complexity. The land is no longer understood as a stable surface but as an assemblage of layers, circulations, and intertwined genealogies. Holes may become spaces of the commons, capable of unsettling identity-based narratives and opening up alternative political imaginaries. The project is grounded in fieldwork conducted in the Cévennes region, including the collection of stories, meetings and conversations, historical research, underground explorations, and the development of collective storytelling and speculative narrative practices. These materials and investigations will inform a moving-image practice shaped by collective staging and attentive to ways of embodying narratives capable of opening up alternative relationships to the present beneath the surface of official histories.

What do you do when a word is stuck right on the tip of our tongue like that? Omnipresent, fluid, and ever-shifting, the word “toxic”¹ surrounds us. Sometimes it overwhelms us. Often, it suffocates us. With this word, we want to describe a series of phenomena that affect us in our daily lives, our jobs, our reading, our relationships, our refrigerators, or even the words we use: that sense that a pervasive toxicity constantly slows down our movements, our interactions, and our ability to act. Our question is simple: what resources or “vitamins” do we have at our disposal? To sharpen our tools, five sessions featuring: · mornings devoted to narratives and stories to share: a speaker will address us from their field of expertise (literature, ecology, activism, sociology); · afternoons dedicated to experimentation through writing, led by poets, a translator, and a filmmaker, during which we, in turn, will have to find the words. Five sessions and a final edition to journey together through an autumn and winter that will undoubtedly lead to a politically explosive spring. It’s up to us to reinvent the seasons, since, as they say, there aren’t any left…

The Magnetic Residencies artistic committee met on July 7, 2026, and selected artist Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin for a residency at Bétonsalon as part of the 5th edition of this program. Bétonsalon will host Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin in residence for three months, from April to early July 2026. She will receive a monthly grant of €2,500, benefit from a studio-apartment at the Cité Internationale des Arts as part of the Institut Français x Cité Internationale des Arts program, receive curatorial support from the Bétonsalon team, as well as networking opportunities with art professionals to develop his research. Residency Project Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin’s research will centre on the potential of renewable energy and other digital technologies to be re-envisioned as tools for repair, relation and cultural memory within urban Caribbean diasporic contexts. Attentive to wider structural inequalities, the project explores personal and collective practices of renewal and transformation in the context of climate and health inequities. The enquiry is shaped via a lens of relation, taking into consideration the shared and distinct colonial legacies that connect the UK and France.  Involving sun, air and other elemental energy, she is interested in how digital technologies might be utilised with gentleness, vibrancy and sensitivity. Working poetically across research and installation, she aims to translate invisible digital systems into tactile and sensorial forms that explore the intersections of identity, ecology and technological mediation.  During the residency, she will inform her enquiry by engaging with institutions such as the Centre for Earth Politics at Université Paris Cité and CIRESC (Centre international de recherches sur les esclavages et post-esclavages). In parallel, she will draw on living rhythmic practices, including movement and sound, as forms of embodied knowledge. She will be guided by an interdisciplinary practice that approaches physical interventions as archive, cultivating space for reflection and exchange.