Events

Friday, 3 May, from 4 pm to 9 pm
Opening of the exhibition at Bétonsalon

Saturday, 4 May, from 6 pm to 10 pm
Opening of the exhibition at Pauline Perplexe

Friday, 17 May, from 3 pm to 6 pm
Béton Book Club: collective reading of The Promise of Happiness, by Sara Ahmed (2010), in English

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: ’I just want you to be happy’, ’I’m happy if you’re happy’. Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the ’happiness duty’, the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression sometimes causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of figures as the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings, she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

Sara Ahmed is a feminist writer and independent scholar. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional culture

Saturday, 25 May, from 3 pm to 4:30 pm at Bétonsalon
Launch of the book La Part affective (Paraguay Press) by Sophie Orlando and conversation with Émilie Renard and Elena Lespes Muñoz
And for parents coming with their children, in parallel, Beep beep!: flipbook workshop, for children aged 5 and over

In La Part affective, Sophie Orlando chronicles the recent transformations in the occupation and life of teachers. Her text talks about the porosities existing today in art schools between legitimate and minority knowledges. It gathers artists’ voices, inner monologues, class notes, student contributions to explain how pedagogical links are forged today, how they are based above all on the circulation of affects. The link between the intimate and the political makes it possible to write a renewed narrative about art.

Sophie Orlando is an author, art historian and researcher, professor in art history and theory at the École Nationale Supérieure, Villa Arson, Nice. She seeks to understand how artistic knowledge is produced and how it is denormalised. She has published numerous articles on identity politics, Black studies and contemporary art in Great Britain (Revue de l’art, Muséologie), and in particular on British Black Art (Critical interventions, Critique d’art). She conducted artist Sonia Boyce’s monography, Thoughtful disobedience (Les Presses du Réel / Villa Arson). She also co-edited an issue of the Cahiers du Mnam titled “Globalisées, mondialisées, contemporaines. Pratiques, productions et écritures de l’art aujourd’hui, 2023”. As a researcher in the AHRC programme “Black artists and Modernism” (2015-2018, UAL, Middlesex University, London), she co-directed with susan pui san lik and curator Nick Aikens the seminar then the digital book Conceptualism: Intersectional Readings, International Framings (Van Abbemuseum, 2019). Since 2019, she has been involved in critical approaches to art education. She runs a digital edition and a book collection, “La surface démange”, about critical, institutional and alternative pedagogies in art.

from 5 pm to 6:30 pm at Fondation Pernod Ricard
Launch of Pour des écoles d’art féministes ! (2024), collective book co-published by ESACM and Tombolo Presses

Programme: Presentation, readings, discussion, and stamping of the books with Sophie Lapalu, Michèle Martel, and Clémentine Palluy in charge of editorial coordination as well as contributors: T*Félixe Kazi-Tani, Gærald Kurdian, Vinciane Mandrin, Sophie Orlando, Émilie Renard, and Liv Schulman.

The book: Retranscribing a cycle of intersectional feminist lectures, interviews, workshops, and discussion groups in an art school is crucial to sharing empowering tools and shaking up the implicit criteria that structure our views and practices (identification with Western visual norms, romantic-capitalist representations of the artist-author...). We believe it is essential to give a voice to artists and those who support them in the ways they apprehend and thwart power relations.

The primary aim of this book is to share the content hosted and produced at the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole between 2017 and 2022. It is also an opportunity to work with a group of students, artists, and researchers, to think about how to collectively elaborate invitations but also the creation of the book; it is a tool for collective and ideally horizontal pedagogical work at the heart of a hierarchical and hierarchizing institution. Invitations, transcription and editing of texts were done jointly.

Editorial coordination: Lilith Bodineau, Adèle Bornais, Nelly Catheland, Charlotte Durand, Martha Fely, Lola Fontanié, Eulalie Gornes, Chloé Grard, Sophie Lapalu, Eden Lebegue, Michèle Martel, Sarah Netter, Clémentine Palluy, Mauve Perolari, Simon Pastoors, Rune Segaut, Danaé Seigneur

Texts by: Nino André & Vinciane Mandrin, Rachele Borghi, Tadeo Cervantes, Adiaratou Diarrassouba, Kaoutar Harchi, T*Félixe Kazi-Tani, Nassira Hedjerassi, Gærald Kurdian, H.Alix Sanyas, Sophie Orlando, Émilie Renard, Liv Schulman, Danaé Seigneur, Pau Simon

Graphic design: Morgane Masse
Co-edition: Esacm / Tombolo Presses
300 pages
First edition: 700 copies

Saturday, 15 June — as part of Treize’Estival
from 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm: Tape a Nap: scotch painting workshop, for adults
at 4:30 pm: Presentation of Gwendal Coulon’s #followmoistp Art pour Grandir residency with students from collège Évariste Galois (75013), followed by a guided tour of Sylvie Fanchon’s “SOFARSOGOOD” exhibition for families led by the students
from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm: tour of the exhibition by Bétonsalon’s team, as part of a ‘RandoTram’ with Tram – réseau art contemporain Paris / Île-de-France
from 5 pm to 7 pm: Launch of the book Mémoire de l’oublieur (Les commissaires anonymes) by Charlie Boisson, cooking and oblea tasting

In Mémoire de l’oublieur, artist Charlie Boisson brings back the carnival tradition of the obleas, ceremonial pastries sitting between the waffle and the wafer which invoke the folklore of medieval feasts and hijacked clerical iconography. This book revives the figure of these singular hawkers who went as far as betting their merchandise to the most daring. By studying the symbols of the motifs which adorn the obleas mould, Charlie Boisson revisits the tool, its forms, and its iconography in a collaborative creative process. During a residence at the art centre Le Creux de l’Enfer in Thiers in 2021, he was joined by Thiers volunteers, as well as illustrator Arnaud Descheelmacker and blacksmith Pierre Pagès. With them, he gave back to the object its cultural load and function as a utensil during public baking sessions in the town market. The book, prolonged by articles by Yoann Dumel-Vaillot and Elsa Vettier, lingers on the playful dimension of this tradition, but also the whole symbolism which crossed the object through the centuries. To celebrate the launch of the book with good humour and the sense of sharing characterizing this popular custom, Charlie Boisson proposes a baking and tasting of obleas in front of Bétonsalon for the TREIZE’ESTIVAL.

Born in 1980, Charlie Boisson graduated from the École des beaux-arts de Saint-Étienne in 2005; he lives and works in Paris, where he teaches (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). His work as a sculptor was presented at the 68th Jeune Création festival in 2018, and was the subject of a double solo exhibition, La pantoufle invertie, at Galerie Tator and at Bikini in Lyon. In 2017, he took part in the Parcours St Germain and was included in the selection for the 61st Salon de Montrouge in 2016. He also took part in the Rennes biennale off at 40mcube in 2016 and in the Open sky museum project as part of the ‘+ de réalité’ programme at the Beaux-arts de Nantes in 2013. His last solo exhibition, Coincés, was held in 2022 with ABW Warnant Architect, at the Parc Saint-Léger in Nevers, and several collective projects have since shown his work, notably at the Emerige Endowment Fund’s Espace Voltaire as part of the Transfuges exhibition, and in 2022 at Pauline Perplexe for the exhibition Cette inondation là, mais en mieux. His project Les moules à oublies saw the light of day in 2021, following a residency and exhibition at Le Creux de l’Enfer in Thiers, and then at La serre in Saint-Etienne.