Profane n°18

Time for a drink outside, on what used to be a Paris campus. It’s a balmy day, the first time we’ve been here, and we’re waiting for the round table on “Taking a look at our surroundings” to begin. So we observe the building’s transformation, wondering what a third place is. The former Sorbonne Nouvelle, built in the 1970s, reminds us of Bernard, who was a lecturer at the nearby Tolbiac university, while creating carpets at home in a tower block in the Olympiades district. The architecture of the 1970s. Some love it, others prefer to leave the city to build a house in lime and hemp, in tune with nature, with their hands and their patience. The city or the countryside. The suburbs too: it’s clearly a good place to live in Bagneux, where every year an artistic event attracts the residents. If I had to choose, I’d go for the seaside, in Brittany for example, towards Paimpol, where Denis’ silhouette can be made out as he stalks the beaches in search of crab claws and edible crab carcasses for minute sculptures. The shore, the call of the sea, the figure of the sailor: Hubert knows it well, as he liked to hunt out canvases depicting only fishermen with pipes. A collector at heart, he has many other modest treasures, including some 300 film posters featuring the Statue of Liberty. 300… the figures always make you dizzy. This one: 250,000. That’s the number of photographs of cemeteries taken by André all over the world. That’s also the number of amateur photos Christophe has collected, from family albums and boxes of photos found at flea markets and antique shops in Berlin. Among a multitude of other accumulations that squat in his artist’s studio. Amateur photography is also a mine for Jonathan, who compulsively looks for those in which the subject disappears, the matrix of his artistic practice. The album, that abyss of intimacy, even without a face… Matthieu has brought back from Tokyo a thick notebook containing matchboxes that tell us a lot about the wanderings of a certain Matsuko. Who was this daughter of fire? From the flames to the embers, we start dreaming of a barbecue, a ritual for fine weather. We’ll have to call Antoine, who’s certainly as good at lighting them as he is at drawing them. The round table is about to begin.

Carine Soyer