Project

Designed as a kind of intermediary between a multimedia library and a theater, CAC Brétigny is more than open to its surroundings. From the creation of on-site artworks that make it possible to take over and significantly alter a site, to involving amateur groups in producing and appreciating art, CAC Brétigny has always emphasized its singularity by paying special attention to the women and men who form the art center and allow it to grow.

CAC Brétigny has been fashioning a structure and a program of events and exhibitions that make both artists and audiences true end users. The program of art events, structured by Céline Poulin, includes all the activities of the art center, from communications to production to outreach. CAC Brétigny finds itself functioning as a collective space, where each guest, each partner and each member of the team is actively participating in the construction and identity of the project. For the experimental video channel “Pillow Programme”, the CAC Brétigny staff thus invited certain artists who have been a part of the art center’s daily existence, who have shared in and supported its activities. In 2022, “Nest” is also curated collectively, involving all the people working at the art center. Within this exhibition, the experimentations of l’Ǝcole, a project co-created by the art center team and different users, artists, theorists, teachers, etc, write themselves. CAC Brétigny is in fact fed by the theories of popular education and co-creation, at the crossroads between amateur and professional practice, between educational and artistic activity. Thus, the graphic designers Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé came up with an identity for CAC Brétigny that is an ever-evolving joint construction with the art center. It is a project that embodies CAC Brétigny, which is diverse and open, like any space that wants to remain vibrant and alive.

Off-site season 2024—2025

“Here, we touch only with our eyes”: this rule, often stated by mediators at the entrance to exhibitions, provokes a good deal of frustration. It imposes a whole set of habits and conventions regulating the ways an exhibition is approached: how it is produced, inhabited, shared. One could even speak of a habitus, to borrow sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term, which designates all of the tendencies that individuals more or less consciously adopt in contact with their social environment. For the 2024—2025 season, CAC Brétigny is overturning all of the exhibition customs: together, we are attempting to free ourselves from the rules that are mechanically applied in contemporary art spaces.

The residencies, exhibitions and off-site events are infused with artistic, educational and collective experiments. This itinerant program, conducive to impermanence, is a continuation of l'Ǝcole, which has been bringing together participants from various backgrounds since 2020, to explore horizontal ways of transmitting practices and knowledge in the visual arts. Entitled “Bascules” (“Seesawing”), this season conceives different ways of learning, and offers a variety of relationships with the works. Special attention is paid to the power relations commonly at play in exhibitions.

Collectively designed by the CAC Brétigny team, “Bascules” started by bringing fluidity into the internal hierarchies. Permanent staff in various posts, along with team members who are doing internships or civilian service, chose to jointly curate this season’s exhibitions and residencies. This decision stems from their shared experience of working in an art center without a director. Since March 2023, CAC Brétigny has been run in a horizontal spirit that involves increased collaboration, something that tends to break down the barriers between our roles (communication, mediation, production, even management). It is through each person’s daily practices, and the experience that collective work implies, that we devised a diverse program in conjunction with the artists.

From September 2024 to July 2025, a series of exhibitions and installations is being presented across the region on sites not dedicated to contemporary art, as well as during local events. Everything has been conceived for the specific context in which it appears, and tries to break free from the codification of the movements, sounds, and gestures in an exhibition. “Bascules” intends to encourage visitor participation and inclusion. This is a matter of giving thought to the place that bodies occupy on exhibition sites, while questioning the effects of the restrictions and standards instituted in those spaces. With the public’s help, we keep transforming the exhibition to adapt it as long as it is used, giving particular consideration to the comfort of the visit. The exhibition is enhanced or reduced according to the desires of visitors, who are encouraged to get their hands on manipulable works, to act upon adjustable installations, to venture into free-practice spaces.

The invited artists joyfully appropriate concepts from design and its history. They explore how objects, spaces and printed mediums are often designed to rationalize our behaviors, by determining the organization of learning and play, work and leisure, solitary activity and common spaces.

Some of them make use of principles linked to affordance, a term that designates the ability of an object or tool to induce an intuitive gesture through its shape. In the field of design, by extension, affordance describes an object’s ability to anticipate or even impose its method of use on users. The artists do quite the opposite, trying to invent non-authoritarian relations with the object-works that they place at the disposal of visitors. With Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa’s works, this is a matter of appropriating them through free gestures, with a view to diverting them from their ordinary functions and imagining multiple, playful, joyful uses. Elise Courcol-Rozès conceives forms that induce potential actions, forms of exchange, or social interactions, leaving a lot of room for shared experimentation.

Others try to break away from contemporary pressures to be productive. They consider the way objects, spaces and mediums affect our behavior. Unlike what ergonomists do, this is not a matter of trying to improve workers’ performance by studying their environment and tools. On the contrary, consideration of the ergonomics of exhibitions and their content is a starting point for formulating open invitations. Louis Chaumier carefully examines how everyday spaces and the knowledge that surrounds them are produced. He transforms standardized environments by bringing tenderness back into them. Juliette George experiments with concrete ways of giving visitors the desire to spend time in exhibition spaces, soliciting their impressions on the comfort of their visit. Hugo Béhérégaray’s works carry traces of their uses, the artist accepting that the exhibition undergoes alteration insofar as people engage with it. Bridget Low and the duo Jacent invite the public into free-practice spaces. The installations they conceive allow everyone to take their time creating autonomously, learning new techniques, or adapting the available furniture and tools, in order to make them into something entirely different.

Finally, educational design and the notion of play furniture open a field of possibilities that can be filled by artistic practices guided by the desire to recreate a space for invention. If one wants to elude assignment to utility, it is quite often enough to say that something is made for children or for play. Louise Perrussel explores returning to children’s jubilatory intuitions, by giving everyone permission to manipulate whatever inspires us with a desire to touch. Camille Juthier creates spaces to inhabit, containing materials that participate in the sensory relationship between the visitors and the works. Ariadna Guiteras reverses the relationship of authority exerted by adults over children, by asking the grown-ups to adapt to the scale of the little ones. Chloé Serre sees play as a way of learning collectively, by appropriating certain codes of communication. Marine Zonca invents other ways of learning, through the appropriation of knowledge by means of mnemonics. These five artists place at everyone’s disposal works inspired by learning-objects, which can be used to shape knowledge according to desires and needs.

The title of the season evokes multifunction objects: the seesaw (balançoire à bascule), the rocking horse (cheval à bascule) and the rocking chair (chaise à bascule). Many designers have designed objects like these: such as Hans Brockhage’s reversible Schaukelwagen chair (circa 1950), which transforms from a rolling car into a chair that can rock back and forth. All of those forms play with balance in the relationship between a body and an object, or between several bodies. On the seesaw, one can take turns rising up into the air, or giving the other person a more or less brutal jump, or find a point of balance together. “Bascules” plays with relations of balance by attempting to create a variety of relationships with the objects, mediums and installations found in the exhibitions.

The CAC Brétigny team
Zélia Bajaj, Milène Denécheau, Léana Doualot, Elisa Klein, Danaé Leroy, Coraline Perrin, Marie Plagnol, Ekaterina Tsyrlina

Archive of the previous seasons available in the History's page.

The CAC Brétigny is a cultural establishment of Cœur d´Essonne Agglomeration. Labeled as a Contemporary Art Center of National Interest, it benefits from the support of the Ministère de la Culture—DRAC Île-de-France, Région Île-de-France and Conseil départemental de l’Essonne, and with the complicity of the Brétigny-sur-Orge's municipality. CAC Brétigny is a member of DCA, TRAM and BLA!.

Staff

Céline Poulin
Director (2016-2023)

Céline Poulin served as the director of CAC Brétigny from June 2016 to April 2023. Her vision for the art center, like her earlier programs and exhibitions, evinces her focus on reception as well as collaboration, information and communications arrangements. In this regard, she has mounted, for example, the group shows “Vocales” and “Desk Set”, as well as the first solo shows in France of Liz Magic Laser, Núria Güell and and recently the first institutional monograph of Sara Sadik. Before starting her activity as an independent curator in 2004, she was head of the youth program of BD BOUM, a comic strip festival affiliated with the Ligue de l'enseignement, a french national network of popular education. She has also worked in institutions as Parc Saint Léger (Pougues-les-Eaux) or Crédac (Ivry-sur-Seine). From 2015 to 2018 she codirected with Marie Preston (with the assistance of Stéphanie Airaud) the travevling seminar “Legacies and modalities of co-creation practices”. This work was an extension of Micro-Séminaire, which was published in 2013 and theorized curatorial practices occurring outside of the usual designated spaces. That gave rise to Co-Création, which was jointly published by Empire and CAC Brétigny. In 2021, the CAC Brétigny and Tombolo Presses published Inventer l’école, penser la co-création [Inventing the school, thinking co-creation] of Marie Preston, of which she is the editorial director with the artist. Céline Poulin is a cofounder and member of the curatorial collective Bureau/, which is behind a dozen exhibitions. She is also a member of IKT.

Elisa Klein
Head of production

A graduate of the Master Critic-Essay—Writing of contemporary art from the University of Strasbourg, Elisa Klein was trained in exhibition coordination and critical writing in contemporary art. She has worked as a production manager at the Frac Île-de-France, at the Gaîté Lyrique and within Fabbula, a cultural practice dedicated to the idea of worlding with digital media in the company of artists and thinkers. Alongside her activity as a producer, she develops a curatorial activity within the Chimère collective with which she organizes exhibitions, transdisciplinary and multi-media editorial projects.

Marie Plagnol
Head of communication and public outreach

After multidisciplinary studies, between philosophy, cultural policies and art history at Sciences Po, Sorbonne University and Panthéon-Sorbonne, Marie Plagnol turns to curation. She develops a curatorial practice rooted in a reflection on the links to be forged between artists, institutions and publics. She is interested in the notion of friendship in its political dimension, as a tool to rethink our networks and communities. As a member of the Champs magnétiques collective, she curated the cycles of exhibitions “Des soleils encore verts” (2021) and “Le réseau des murmures”. Marie Plagnol seeks to establish long-term collaborations with artists and has worked for several years with Céline Pierre. They are currently collaborating on The Skênê Notebooks (2022). Throughout her career, she notably worked at the MAC VAL, at Para Site in Hong Kong and at Council.

Milène Denécheau
Technical and public outreach manager

Holder of a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master's degree in Works Management and Exhibition Mounting, Milène Denécheau trained as a stage manager at Frac Bretagne and Galerie Danysz. At the same time, she is developing her practice of mediation within the art-expression association specialized in the creation and dissemination of contemporary art.

Zélia Bajaj
Partnerships and communication manager

A graduate of a Master's degree in art history and contemporary art from Sorbonne University and Rennes 2, Zélia Bajaj trained in curatorial practices and artistic projects coordination at Coco Velten (Marseille) and the Centre for Contemporary Art of la Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel). They is interested in the way in which the collective redefines a place by transforming its uses, particularly through the pooling of resources and the transmission of knowledges. They recently co-founded the glitch collective with Chloé Bonannini, whose exhibition and cultural action projects are part of a situated and collaborative research approach.

Coraline Perrin
Public outreach Théâtre and CAC Brétigny

Coraline Perrin holds a double master’s in interior design and exhibition design from L’École Supérieure d’Arts et Techniques de Paris (ESAT). An Essonne resident, she focused on the relationships between industrial wastelands, the Seine river and her roots in the Corbeil-Essonnes city area for her degree in interior design. In exhibition design, she asserted her commitment to considering the place of visitors, something which led her to branch out towards working directly with a diverse public by training in cultural mediation. After completing a civic service placement in communication and cultural mediation at CAC Brétigny, she went on to join the Théâtre and CAC Brétigny teams as a cultural mediator.

Esther Gobin-Brassart
Curatorial and production assistant (internship)

Regular collaborators

Anne-Charlotte Michaut
Co-director of the Revue

After studying literature, Anne-Charlotte Michaut moved on to research in history of contemporary art (École du Louvre and Université Paris I). Today she is developing an art critic activity, notably for L’Œil and Manifesto XXI.

Julien Jassaud
Technical management and advice

Julien Jassaud is an artist and programmer. After the ESTP, he studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and the Advanced Institute of Art Media and Sciences (IAMAS) in Japan. As a programmer and technician, he collaborated with many artists such as Christophe Lemaitre for CNEAI and Confort moderne, Aurélien Mole for Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Marlies Pöschl for CAC Brétigny, Fayçale Baghriche for MAGCP, and Mercedes Azpilicueta for CentroCentro in Madrid, Museion in Bolzano (Italy) and CAC Brétigny.

Romain Best
Installation work and construction

Guillaume Rannou
Proofreading

Guillaume Rannou has done theatre in the street, as well as theatre in the theatre, co-created the collective Bracer, self-published the Japenese literary blog êtreaujapon, participated in CIP-IdF’s Commisson of words and invented shows (J’ai !, un essai sur le rugby ; La Vérité en pointure, à partir d’un texte de Derrida ; Nous sommes tous, performance généalogique). With David Poullard, he formed a collective that works on the ordinariness of language (books, posters, performances, etc.) He proofreads: he loves checking everything, sometimes proposing something else, and being among the first to read a text.

Annie-Rose Harrison-Dunn
Translator

Annie-Rose Harrison-Dunn is a freelance translator and journalist. She translates for public art and research institutions. Her non-fiction writing centres on food production as a subject of public interest. She was born in Derby, England, in 1990 and has lived in France since 2012.

Nolwenn Vuillier
Reception and public outreach

Nolwenn Vuillier is an artist. After studying at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, she was a resident at De Ateliers in the Netherlands. Her multidisciplinary practice questions the nature-culture dichotomy and the standardized representations of the world that result from it. Alongside her artistic productions, she develops transmission activities with a variety of audiences. She collaborates with CAC Brétigny's team as a mediator for the off-site seasons.

Administrative hub

Director: Sophie Mugnier
Administrator: Cyril Waravka
Assistant Administrator: Céline Semence
Administrative Assistant and Accountant: Isabelle Dinouard
Assistant Accountant: Nadine Monfermé
Guard: Emmanuel Préau
Maintenance Technician: Rachid Boubekeur

Former members of the team who participated in the project since 2016: Valentine Brémaud (internship), Cathy Crochemar (internship), Camille Duval (internship), Céline Gatel (civic service), Mathieu Gillot (technical and public outreach manager), Domitille Guilé (civic service), Ariane Guyon (internship), Julie Kremer (public outreach officer), Thibault Lambert (head of production), Léa Lecourt (public outreach officer), Elena Lespes Muñoz (Head of communication and public outreach), Camille Martin (head of production), Mathilde Moreau (curator and production assistant), Raheleh Nasiran (internship), Manon Prigent (communication and public outreach manager), Valentina Ulisse (internship and associate curator), Juliette Valenti (internship), Suheyla Yasar (internship), Anna Pericchi (civic service), Rebecca Théagène (intership), Jun Zhang (internship), Tanguy Wagino (civic service), Danaé Leroy (internship), Léana Doualot (civic service), Ekaterina Tsyrlina (internship) and Thomas Maestro (associate curator).