Semblable à un petit os de seiche

Image : collective soap

July 22nd to July 30th, 2023

an exhibition curated by the collective soap
at Bétonsalon - Center for art and Research

With Juliette Ayrault, Nina Azoulay, Marine Ducroux-Gazio, Michelle Feeley, Anna Giner, Claire Gitton, Victor Andrea González, Hélène Janicot, Nicole and Audrey Prédhumeau.

Opening of the exhibition: Saturday, July 22nd at 18h

For its first exhibition Semblable à un petit os de seiche (Like a small cuttlefish bone), the soap collective invited ten artists freshly graduated from, or still studying in, Dominique Figarella’s studio at the ENSBA (Paris), and Sarah Tritz’s "Art department" of the EnsAD school (Paris).

These artists share the same awareness of their everyday environment through the recollection of images, gestures and objects as means of producing rich narrative and formal works of art. The exhibition intends to reflect this attention to the various signs of our close environment — a sensibility oriented in such a way that our banal reality appears elevated.

Statement

"When I eat a crispy rusk, I can’t hear the sound of the radio"
Nathalie Quintane, Remarques.

The artists we have invited share the same attention, the same perceptive sensibility to reality, in the recording of its ordinariness. Their economical approach is rather a re-positioning of manufactured goods than the emergence of a new form, as if they were trying to underline the existing, latent reality that is often left invisible. Thus, the work of art can guide the eye to point out the unseen. This action reveals these works as small monuments or supporting structures that hold and heighten the object they shelter.

All these collected objects (boxes, packagings, crates, fabrics, plastic structures) raise the question of the skin as a carnal envelope — something that prints, molds, delimits a matrix to be left eventually. Those receptacle-objects which remain empty can be considered as the witness of a fossilized trace left by a living being. But, on the other hand, some of them that are more inhabited register the fluids of a moving organism and crystallize its substance.

This way of highlighting a body that left its clothing or an item that extricated itself from its box underlines an ambiguity between presence and absence. There, maybe the use of narration could surpass these antagonism and fictionalize reality. Rather than considering those objects through their relation with shared or buried memories, we could see them as means of sharing unique stories. The biscuit wrapper, the tea spoon and the crumbs constellated on the tablecloth could become true protagonists of our tales. The various works that we have here assembled show us that reality could become a matter of fiction, if we pay attention to it.

Presentation of the collective

The soap collective was born in September 2022. It is formed by 12 students of the curating curriculum of Paris Sorbonne University. Each of them is willing to share the political and artistic values of the young creation. For this first exhibition, soap has set the basis of its curatorial ethics, namely collective communication, active listening and attention to our surroundings.

The members of this collective come from various artistic and academic fields, such as philosophy, applied arts, art history, medical studies and sociology. Underneath soap lie twelve singular sensitivities and singularities that find common ground.

Radhia Bouboune, Benoît Le Boulicaut, Clara Cucchi, Aymeri Duler, Eva Foucault, Anna Koch, Thomas Lemire, Alice de Malliard, Natacha Marini, Chloé Poulain, Balqis Tandjaoui and Jun Zhang.

Partners and financial supports

The exhibition has been produced with the support of the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles d’Île-de-France – Ministère de la Culture as part of the Été culturel 2023 program, The Sorbonne University-Faculté des lettres, the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, Bétonsalon - center for art and research, the Contribution de vie étudiante et de campus, the Crous, the Ville de Paris and the Maison des initiatives étudiantes.

The catalog has been published with the support of the Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard.

Contact

Email : collectivesoap12@gmail.com
Instagram : @collectivesoap