Data Rhei
Bienvenue 2019

"Radical Softness (as My Face After I Use an Exfoliator)" combines both the project and the flow — the point and the line, a smooth transition from one to the other. The experience shows that daily life in modern societies escapes the simplistic dichotomies, which often see the moment and the duration organised in terms of the binary opposition between individual and community. It can be argued that there is a diversity of forms of connections and situations, which are at least perceived as an infinity of possible relationships and individuations. On the other hand, this kind of vision is presented as free, creative and resistant to the models dominating the contemporary world. Despite the power of the network of conveniences and stabilized relationships, alternative forms may appear.

Our existence means drifting from one context to another, adapting to the specificities, customs and desires of the spaces we encounter. A new context capable of accommodating new works of Lucille Leger, Legrand Jäger, Lucas Semeraro and Sophie Varin, who have been with us from the start; a stand-exhibition whose time-frame would be based on the logic of the event, a form of exchange which can be as light as a continuum between life and art. That means to enrich us with a temporary community of signs in circulation, with a view to un-sedimentation of the display of artefacts, re-connecting them to bodies and contemporary fluxes.

The working hypothesis we want to follow for this proposal is to consider the art fair as being at the same time a non-place and a media. Starting from an analysis of media as being an ever remediation of the real, to say that media and the real are inseparable, we want to use Bienvenue Art Fair to interrogate the exhibition as a reality reorganizing device. This goes with the idea that media or exhibition aren’t a permanent structure, they are each time (re)invented through their performance — to say that as for the language each use differs from the precedent — setting the whole structure in an ever-continuing motion.

We are partly responsible for the evolution of the exhibition, or at least of its criticism. We wish to build up a project based on the idea of “radical softness”, borrowed to Californian poetess Lora Mathis. We use softness as a design concept. Radical Softness blurs the lines between the inside and the outside of the exhibition, it undoes what the white cube did by enclosing and sacralising art. It includes art within a broader ecology of people, institutions, objects, cells, landscapes and any non-totalities, softening the relations between human and non-human, but also highlighting human choices as continuing an already ongoing movement. It reminds how every media from language to exhibitions embodies a universal flow, carrying with it traces of the accumulated efforts.

In these conditions of hospitality, we would like to build a temporary shelter, a structure as a booth in which practices will be torn from its soil and from the uniqueness of its context of emergence. In doing so, we want to allow an inclusive conception of media, open to both multiplicity and subjectivity, letting the space appear as a somewhere we arrive with our acquired experience, the main idea being that we always take things halfway.