CAC Brétigny

“Bascules”
Off-site season 2024—2025
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team (Zélia Bajaj, Milène Denécheau, Léana Doualot, Esther Gobin-Brassart, Elisa Klein, Danaé Leroy, Coraline Perrin, Marie Plagnol, Ekaterina Tsyrlina)

“Ainsi font, font, font”
With Ariadna Guiteras, Camille Juthier, Louise Perrussel, Chloé Serre and Marine Zonca

La Ferme, Marolles-en-Hurepoix
07.06—19.07.25
Open from Tuesday to Friday, 2:00-6:00 p.m. and on Saturdays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. and 2:00-6:00 p.m. 

          Set to a lively melody, the title “Ainsi font, font, font” introduces the exhibition and calls to mind a childish tune[1]. Humming this nursery rhyme, we affirm the importance of doing, of the collective and of shared gestures, which turn childhood into a space for free practice to be revisited at any age.

          The interactive and sensorial works of Ariadna Guiteras, Camille Juthier, Louise Perrussel, Chloé Serre and Marine Zonca share with children's furniture a penchant for experimentation, from which emerges proposals for experience. “Far from a miniaturisation of furniture for adults, children's furniture provides an escape from the standardisation of industrial design that spread at the beginning of the twentieth century, deploying a space for formal invention.[2]” For their part, the artists make their works supports for a diverse range of activities, inciting us to play, create and even loll about.

          The exhibition is loosely inspired by the layout of playgrounds, interludes in a world where public places are predominantly designed for adults and for uses considered grown up. By contrast, Louise Perrussel's sculptures invite young and old alike to have fun. Their forms are reminiscent of abacuses, enlarged to the scale of street furniture, inviting everyone to play along the curves, moving the coloured balls that dot them. The spontaneous use of the works installed outdoors continues inside the exhibition space, where both children and adults are free to explore their materiality.

          Putting ourselves at children's level also means designing spaces with them that are adapted to their needs, height and even their ways of interacting. In doing so, we disrupt a social structure founded on adult domination, which is exemplified by the design of spaces by and for bodies that meet societal norms (weight, height, motor skills, etc.) and that are perceived as able. Ariadna Guiteras' installation, inspired by construction games and blanket forts, is made to the scale of the children who helped her build it. Adults are welcome inside the structure, but it's up to them to contort themselves to get in. In this exhibition, everyone is free to adapt the space, modulate it, arrange it, make it more comfortable and do as they please within it.

          As the artist, writer and games designer Mary Flanagan wrote: “games are profound little worlds of human experience [that] have the potential to awaken in us an understanding of the world around us[3]”. They are also terrains for experimentation, where the elements made available, the constraints they generate or the rules they propose encourage different ways of relating to our surroundings. The objects that Chloé Serre makes are reminiscent of mini-golf or croquet obstacles, but here nothing is fixed: we can try them on our own or with others, creating our own circuit between the artworks and inventing our own rules. These rules can be written in a book there to keep record of the empirical knowledge generated by this playful experience.

          It's also the open, inconclusive nature of a game that can make it an activity conducive to learning that is anchored in experience and that draws on each person's imagination. Marine Zonca's installation offers a space where we can go to gather our thoughts. She incorporates mnemonic devices, exploring an unconventional method for memorising whereby knowledge acquisition occurs through tangible encounters with objects, images or materials and the association of ideas.

          In conclusion, this exhibition seeks to open the way for uses considered unproductive, by placing leisure, sharing and discovery centre stage. Camille Juthier's works invite us to slow down in order to listen, to sounds and to our sensations. She combines a bed, a space for invention in childhood and a refuge throughout life, with a shelf to create a hybrid piece of furniture that each visitor can engage with in their own way. In a soft relaxing environment, the artist makes sensory objects available to visitors. Sources of comfort, these small objects with different weights, textures and grips can, according to what is needed, calm anxiety or stimulate the user’s imagination.

          Continuing the experience, the exhibition's scenography includes a space dedicated to free activity, with furniture and a multitude of tools, materials and books for (re)discovering, inventing and making. “Ainsi font, font, font”: this is how the “Bascules” cycle concludes. The last words of the nursery rhyme – “Trois petits tours et puis s’en vont” – are a nod to the season's three group exhibitions, marked by the experience of collective curation by the art centre’s team.

[1] Ainsi font, font, font is a popular French nursery rhyme accompanied by hand actions. The words of the refrain could be roughly translated into English as: “This is what the little puppets do, do, do. They do, do, do three little rounds and then off they go”.

[2] Marie-Ange Brayer and Céline Saraiva (dir.), L’enfance du design : un siècle de mobilier pour enfant, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2024, p.55.

[3] Mary Flanagan, Mapscotch (Mappemarelle), Organon 3, Publishing House for Handbooks, 2021, p.10.

 

Ariadna Guiteras’ practice engages bodies and the relationships that shape them. Starting with performance, she now explores other materials like ceramics and textiles. Her recent work uses strategies such as slow temporalities and collaborative processes to delve into concepts like the dissolution of the child-adult binary and the medieval theory of the “porous body”. She has been an artist-in-residence at Hangar in Barcelona (2015) and Gasworks in London (2019), and her work has been exhibited at venues including CentroCentro in Madrid (2018), Fundació Miró in Barcelona (2019) and The Bower in London (2019).

Camille Juthier (born in 1990) lives and works between Aubervilliers and Clermont-Ferrand, where she teaches at the École supérieure d’art de Clermont Métropole. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire, she practices sculpture, sensory installation, video, text, and performance. Her practice crosses the fields of crafting and design, in order to produce forms that support alternative histories. In 2023, she was a beneficiary of the FoRTE program with Glassbox Paris, where she completed a residency and presented a solo exhibition. In 2024, she was awarded the Prix Art Ensemble by the Gulbenkian Foundation and the CENTQUATRE-PARIS, and received support from Mécènes du Sud. Exhibitions include the 64^th Salon de Montrouge (2019), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2023) and the Frac Île-de-France (2024).

Louise Perrussel (born in 1998) lives and works in Nantes. She graduated from the École européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne in 2021 and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in 2023. She explores porosities between the inert and the living, between objects, things, and sculpture. Her practice aims to re-evaluate our bodies’ links with the common and discreet objects of everyday life. In 2023, her work was acquired by the Art Delivery library in Nantes. In 2024, she exhibited at Parc de la Gaudinière in Nantes, and participated in the 6th edition of 100% L’EXPO at La Villette in Paris.

Chloé Serre (born in 1986) lives and works in Saint-Etienne. A graduate of the École supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Etienne, she enriches her practice through regular collaborations with live performance artists, as well as through her numerous meetings and co-creation sessions with various members of the public. Through sculptures activated in performances, she explores the rules that underpin human interactions. She participated in the 64^th Salon de Montrouge in 2019, the 19^th Hors Pistes festival at the Centre Pompidou, and several solo and group exhibitions, including at the macLYON (2021), and the Creux de L'Enfer in Thiers (2022).

Marine Zonca (born in 1993) lives and works in Paris. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. Her practice combines sculpture, drawing, and animation, as well as historically situated techniques like fresco, to produce anachronisms. At the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, she conducts research into 19^th-century mnemonic practices. Her work has appeared in several exhibitions, including at KOMMET in Lyon (2020), DOC! in Paris (2020), La Serre in Saint-Etienne (2022) and La Tôlerie in Clermont-Ferrand (2023).