The Magnetic Residencies artistic committee met on September 24, 2024, and selected artist Racheal Crowther for a residency at Bétonsalon as part of the 3rd edition of this program. Racheal Crowther will be in residence at Bétonsalon for 3 months, from April to July 2025. She will receive a grant of €2,500 per month, a studio-apartment at the Cité internationale des Arts, a curatorial support from the Bétonsalon team, as well as networking opportunities with art professionals to develop her research. The residency project Racheal Crowther is interested in the biopolitics that govern the public and private spaces we inhabit, and that constitute their physical and psychological boundaries. She explores the social constructions that underlie the material functions of these spaces, drawing on the social, commercial and institutional environments in which she herself has evolved. In her essay The Eternal Pursuit of the Unattainable (Montez Press, 2024), Racheal Crowther looks at the different uses and representations of perfume, from poison to counterfeit, and its power to influence consumer psychology. She demonstrates how the marketing of perfumes exploits the human yearning for something beyond the ordinary, and explores the issues linked to the socio-economic level that determines access to them, the expression of the gender identities that underpin them, and the history of the acquisition of olfactory materials. During her residency at Bétonsalon, she hopes to deepen her research into olfactory materials by studying the way in which odours are used to influence mood and behaviour, based on studies at the ISIPCA (Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l’Aromatique alimentaire) and the olfactory archives of the Osmothèque de Versailles, the largest conservatory of perfumes in the world.

ADAGP – French royalty collecting and distribution society et Bétonsalon – center for art and research (Paris), in partnership with the Archives de la critique d’art (Rennes) The artistic committee of the ADAGP / Bétonsalon research grant met on 10 June 2025 and chose No Anger as the laureate. They are the eighth artist to receive this grant after franck leibovici (2017), Liv Sculman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir (2022), artist duo Irma Name (2023), and Florian Fouché (2024). The ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant is an endowment of €15,000 intended to support an artist in a research project over the course of several months. Bétonsalon – centre for art and research supports the artist in the research and production process. The artist receives €4,000 in fees and €8,000 for production. The artistic project Il ne faut pas oublier le futur [We must not forget the future] How can dissident bodies disrupt a patriarchal writing of the future, resist it, and turn hope into a political act? Invoking Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure, No Anger aims to propose alternative narratives to the relationship of human/machine subordination, through experimentation with forms of codependence and hybridity that escape the normative and validist visions of technology. In particular, it will involve rethinking the narrative of the destinies assigned to marginalised and invisibilised bodies through cyber-feminist hacking strategies that challenge dominant ontologies and temporalities. Following Nathalie Magnan’s reflections on the media construction of identities deemed subversive, this research aims to highlight the counter-visualities generated by the tactical media invested by activist collectives, as well as the representations of a minority common that they help to shape and spread. Looking at piracy and virality as tools for derailing, contaminating and reconfiguring dysfunctional networks and institutional structures, this project aims to cripple our imaginations by exploring “futurographies” that break with binary and technophobic schemas. Through the intersection of lesbian, queer and disabled experiences, No Anger aims to question the perception and encoding of ‘states of body’ based on a relationship of complementarity and reciprocity with the technologies that support and structure her daily life. Drawing on the visual grammar of Nathalie Magnan’s film Lesborama (1995) and the programme L’Œil du Cyclone (broadcast on Canal+ from 1991 to 2000), No Anger will make a film combining extracts from written and film archives in Nathalie Magnan’s collection with textual, vocal and performative experiments co-constructed with a robot. Deeply rooted in personal narratives, this work will draw multiple connections from the testimonies of people affected by these issues, enabling us to cross-reference visions of desirable and emancipatory futures within different communities and historical contexts.

  As part of the exhibition “The Untamable Hand” by Hedwig Houben, the artists in this programme have been invited to present a series of performances, readings and artistic practice workshops from which to probe the ambiguous territories of embarrassment, disgust and the body’s unexpectedness. Exploring the forms and resistances of the body in the face of aesthetic and social norms, this programme aims to explore the critical and liberating power of letting go. Programme: • 4pm to 5pm “From hysteria as symptom language to feminist poetics: arts, bodies, writing.” Lecture by Sofia Batko. • 5pm to 6pm Discussion with Hedwig Houben, Émilie Renard and Vincent Enjalbert on the exhibition “The Untamable Hand”. • 7pm to 10pm “Borborygmi” evening Readings, performances and DJ set With Nicole*, Lisa Lecuivre, Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser, Helena de Laurens, Star Finch and cl✰ra. We call “borborygmi” the sounds that, rising from our intestines, give voice to the liquids and gases of the food our bodies are trying—more or less laboriously—to process, transform and digest. We can agree, even though we’re not all equal when it comes to food, that a purée won’t sound quite the same as a raw bell pepper during digestion… Burrrp, beuuuurp, beuuuurglll are just some of the onomatopoeias that evoke the noisy churn of matter transmuting deep within the recesses of our guts. A machinery of flesh made up of acids and all sorts of fluids, these noises remind our minds—so quick to deny—that a functional body is one that produces plenty of miasmas and gurgles. The mystery of alchemy is long gone; the mechanics of a stool-to-be make themselves audibly known. The louder, longer, and more rolling the sound, the greater the embarrassment—and with it, the revulsion at the idea of letting others hear the workings of one’s inner self. Projecting its textured orality into the outside world, the body speaks and writes itself, offering up the rankness of its own language. Thus, much against our will, the sounds spill out and overflow, while brows furrow, nostrils flare, and upper lips curl in distaste. In her performance Borborygmus¹, Hedwig Houben speaks of borborygmi as a manifestation of the IT within her: “IT, she explains, standing before a table strewn with clay-colored, intestine-like forms, is this multiple, undefined, and evolving thing. (…) It’s as if something managed to get inside (my) body. But how? And who? And what?”² Beyond mere anecdote or aside, the borborygmus—or any other phonetic bodily discharge—evokes the language of a body that trembles, pulses, and undulates to the rhythm of its own “now”. A body momentarily become other, which runs wild and seems to do as it pleases. Something is made manifest that, in spite of us, inserts itself into our speech, derailing it—forcing a pause, a restart, or an awkward cough. Something needs to come out, literally or figuratively, provoking shame, self-disgust (or disgust at others), a loss of control, and a sense of estrangement from oneself. What do we do with this IT? Should it be tamed, silenced, allowed to do its thing, or given a space of its own? Speaking of another kind of release—the barf—American poet Dodie Bellamy writes: “barf is messy, irregular, but you can feel in your guts that it’s going somewhere, you can’t stop it… you’ve just got to let it runs its course.”³ And what if what disturbs us most isn’t this encounter with an autonomous interiority, but the looks from others—marked by discomfort, disgust, and judgment. Already, morality rears its head, building its foundations on a physiological reaction presented as “natural.” As limit experiences positioned on the fringes of the thinkable or the acceptable, discomfort and disgust evoke a moral dimension that disciplines, corrects, and holds bodies in place. Perhaps we need to shift our focus—to let this unruly body do its thing, in order to interrogate discomfort and disgust as powerful analytical tools for understanding the hierarchies and discriminations that their social and political uses enable. How can “letting go” become an intellectual position, a methodology with its own aesthetic and political priorities? What does it mean to insist on disorder, improvisation, and release—for what this provokes in ourselves and in others—as a means of cultural critique and political engagement? While we assume them to be spontaneous and beyond language, aren’t these bodily manifestations and the discomfort they cause shaped by our social habits? It is precisely because they dwell in—or are relegated to—the murky margins of our social behaviors, that we need to collectively examine them, that we need words to tell their stories, images to capture them, gestures to reenact them. This program seeks to deconstruct and question the behavioral and aesthetic norms that shape our imaginations. Elena Lespes Muñoz

Notations, protocols, scripts, drawings, diagrams, archives, assemblages, narratives… What if every performance were essentially bound to forms of writing? And what if these traces of an uncertain past contained within them the possibilities of distant futures ? In this lecture series, we will question the relationship between action and score across different fields of practice: artistic, institutional, activist. Artists will come to speak about their relationship to archives as performance scores; activists, about the techniques they use to transmit their actions; curators and archivists will present the tools they deploy to preserve them; exhibition curators will discuss the know-how they develop to (re)activate them.

“Tu vois je veux dire” is an Artistic and Cultural Education project run by Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research (Paris, 13th), Ivry’s Contemporary Art Centre – Le Crédac (Ivry-sur-Seine, 94) and La Briqueterie – National Choreographic Development Center of Val-de-Marne (Vitry-sur-Seine, 94), in collaboration with the Adolphe Chérioux highschool in Vitry-sur-Seine, Marianne High School in Villeneuve-le-Roi, and Armand Guillaumin High School in Orly. Initiated in 2023-2024, the “Tu vois je veux dire” project takes as its starting point Bétonsalon’s Young Mediators Program and allows high school students to experiment with different forms of mediation around artistic practices from both visual and performing arts. Continuing in 2024-2025, this project seeks—through observation, listening, encounters with artists and art professionals, dialogue, and artistic practice—to challenge the traditional roles and voices associated with discourse on artworks within cultural and artistic institutions. It does so by imagining and inventing original public engagement formats: podcasts, dance-based tours, design publication, and more. In 2025–2026, students from eight classes at three high schools in Val-de-Marne had the opportunity to share and experiment with new ways of approaching and presenting educational programs around Pierre Creton’s exhibition “Sambucus Nigra,” on view at the Crédac from April through June 2026: • At Adolphe Chérioux High School, a 10th-grade STD2A class worked with artist Maureen Nass. The sessions combined screenings of Pierre Creton’s films with workshops aimed at creating a sensory map (drawing, collage, cartography) using materials gathered during the movement exercises, as well as writing exercises exploring the imagination of the garden, conducted both on-site outdoors at the high school and in the Briqueterie studio. • At Marianne High School, the 11th-grade general education classes, as well as the 11th- and 12th-grade specialized visual arts classes, worked with artist Romain Grateau. The sessions combined image capture, scanning, writing workshops based on texts by Pierre Creton and Annie Ernaux, followed by collage and photomontage projects, with an emphasis on the concept of a “subverted herbarium” and the repurposing of office tools—photography, photocopying, and printing—to produce images; this body of work culminated in the publication of Ne pas écrire sur les tables. • At Armand Guillaumin High School, a 11th-grade hairdressing class worked with artist Constantin Jopeck. The sessions took the form of a filmmaking workshop in which the students, divided into pairs, styled wigs while the session was filmed. They were followed by two visual arts workshops centered on herbariums: After a presentation on the work of Pierre Creton and a screening of excerpts from Sept promenades avec Mark Brown in the library, the students created herbariums related to hairstyling by applying a technical technique to a plant; they then continued this work by producing a short video of their technique, as the hairstyling practices had been filmed by Constantin Jopeck for the video Les Frondeuses. The project also resulted in a journal.

As part of a “Youth Mediators”, program, a class of UPE2A students from Marcel Cachin highschool (Le Blanc-Mesnil) worked on the exhibition “A Shepherd’s Heart”, by Orla Barry, with the goal of presenting it to another class. • The Young Mediator·ices Program : The UPE2A class was led to discover the exhibition of Orla Barry, to do research on the artist, and design and conduct a guided tour for a junior year class, who visited the art center as part of a collective presentation event.   • The Workshop : To conclude the students’ encounter with Orla Barry’s work, a workshop with artist and de-designer Inès Bel Mokhtar was organised at the school to design a small edition based on their memories attached to a personal fabric object. Through this artistic practice, the students took as their starting point their discovery of Orla Barry’s work, at the crossroads of writing, storytelling and textile work. Inès Bel Mokthar offered a half-day introduction to publishing through the collective creation of a fanzine about the diasporas from which they originate. Combining writing, images, typography and materials, the workshop invited everyone to reflect on the link between textiles, memory and territory, while resonating with the exhibition ‘Cœur de bergère’ (Shepherdess’ Heart).