Doux Baisers Les Exhibitionnistes
01 | 01 | 17
Dear visitors,
We are very sorry that we could not meet you in person. We hope that you enjoy your time here; a few days in the Alps, enlivened by the concrete marvels of Breuer’s modernist architecture, would have pleased us too! When we received the invitation to participate in an exhibition at the Centre d’Art de Flaine, we were ecstatic. Unfortunately, for the moment we are blocked in the reserves of the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Lyon. Immobilized as we are, we were nonetheless inspired by the history of Flaine and its birth as an « ideal » ski station, in which each of us found resonances in our own shared stories of modernist architecture (spanning the gamut from avant-garde utopias to a certain idea of the sublime).
The setting of Flaine, combined with our inability to move, led us to present ourselves to you in the manner that you see arranged on the heart-shaped tables of this room. Although we can not be here with you, we hope that in this way you can, in some small way, be with us, and that our photos inspire you to play with our stories in a way that our real presence could never allow (can you believe that you can fit all thirteen of us in your pocket!) We left the creation of our paper surrogates to a group of young artists from l’Ecole d’Art de l’Aglommeration d’Annecy, giving them free rein to dream up a manner of presentation that references the ideas of the modular, the utilitarian, and the romantic that, in various ways, are so dear to all of us. Faced with the facts of our absence, our reduced scale, and our new tactile and mobile form, our hosts decided to reverse the codes of the exhibition by placing us at you, the visitors, disposition, while concretizing in paint our names, authors, and explanatory texts.
It is we, poor copies of ourselves that we are here, photographed during other exhibitions and at other times, who will leave the room with you, to accompany you on your travels for as long as you wish. And while we offer ourselves up free of charge, we are not unlimited; each of us is presented here in a print run of two-hundred, and when you take one, or two, or one of each of us away with you, our presence in Flaine diminishes, wasting away to a point of absolute zero, an absence to which only the words on the walls will remain testament.
Doux baisers!*
*Kisses!