Savoir faire

The Exhibition Savoir Faire Focuses On The Gesture, Both In Its Alienation By Current Production Logics And In Its Emancipating Singularity..

Artists : Hughes Dubuisson, Camille Dufour, Barbara Geraci, Olivia Hernaïz, Hélène Moreau, Pauline Pastry, Alice Pilastre, Éric Van Hove

Curators : Pierre Arese et Laurent Courtens

The works of the eight associated artists affirm a fundamental but compromised conception: the exercise of the profession is above all the implementation of an intelligence that is both practical and creative, in resistance to the formatting imposed by standardised organisational systems.

Olivia Hernaïz parodically evokes the way in which bodies are constrained, subjugated and instrumentalised by capitalist production. Hughes Dubuisson, Camille Dufour and Alice Pilastre engage their own mastery of traditional processes (coin casting, wood engraving, weaving). Barbara Geraci and Pauline Pastry investigate the legacy of lost dexterity and the emergence of new knowledge in industrial work. Éric Van Hove mobilises the know-how of Moroccan craftsmen in the experimentation of a project linked to the colonial past, and makes the link between the exploitation of natural resources and that of labour power. Hélène Moreau hybridises modern aesthetics and attention to craft in the arrangement of precious volumes mixing prints, impressions, metal and wood cuttings.

Work, manuality, materiality, the movements of thought and bodies at work, are all modalities of existence of the gesture, the fruit of a knowledge and a doing of which it is both the ferment and the horizon.

A programme of meetings and podcasts extends several of the issues raised in the exhibition. These include the evolution of working conditions and their impact on people, the gesture as the very foundation of our humanity, the reappropriation of the means of production, and the questioning of the ancestral distinction between art and craft.