Fifteen artists with heterogeneous practices and aesthetics are brought together in the exhibition No Drama or Suspense — Durational Conditions: what they have in common is a workspace, Marseilles’ City Studios. Triangle-Astérides accompanies them, following their research and questions — from the most theoretical to the most everyday and material. An “activity anchored in the folds of the present, always to be remade”, which invites us to consider artistic production and works not from the angle of innovation or rupture, but on the contrary by paying attention to the “gigantic work of continuity”.

This attentional shift is the one proposed by sociologists Jérôme Denis and David Pontille in Le soin des choses*, the book under whose aegis the exhibition is placed. In it, they argue that maintenance, defined as “the art of making things last”, acts “as an operator in decentering (or refocusing) the gaze. By placing material fragility in the foreground, it helps to make us sensitive to the modulations and degradations at work in the material fabric of human societies.”
Following in their footsteps, No Drama or Suspense — Durational Conditions proposes to put the works in conversation with a whole body of work “usually left to one side, which remains in the shadows of exhibitions, reserved for spaces and times from which the public is absent”: that of those whose gestures and know-how “ensure the material conditions of art.”
Guided tours from the angle of various maintenance operations, allowing voices and experiences ordinarily invisible to the public to be heard, will take place throughout the course of the exhibition.

 

With: Mégane Brauer, Paul Chochois, Juliette Déjoué, Côme Di Meglio, Abdessamad El Montassir, Estel Fonseca, Basile Ghosn, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Sophie T. Lvoff , Manoela Medeiros, Eva Medin, Nicolas Nicolini, Aurélien Potier, Hanna Rochereau and Flore Saunois

 

* Le soin des choses. Politiques de la maintenance, éditions La Découverte, 2022.
All quotations are taken from it: in order of appearance in the text, pp. 29, 37, 11, 25, 32, 33. Translations by Triangle-Astérides.

The City of Marseille is developing a cultural policy to support young creation. It provides artists living and working in Marseille, selected by an independent jury of professionals, with 15 low-rent studios for a period of 23 months. The exhibition marks the end of these 23 months.