Chasing Napoleon

Chasing Napoleon, Palais de Tokyo, 2010




























Unacabine (and the original in an FBI basement) © Kusmirowski

Why is Theodore Kaczynscki's manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, kept secret by american services alongside his memoirs ? what frightens so much the american system now he is strictly isolated under police control ?
To understand america's public ennemy,The Unabomber Book Collection by Dora Winter's collective builds up the escapist strategies while Robert Kusmirowski's Unacabine give existence to Kaczynski's flee into the wild.
The presence of his shed in the gallery space of The Palais de Tokyo challenges its legitimity : what makes the difference between the shed he lived in, the lived object, and the fake one ?
The door that asks to be opened, the incapacity to enter, deepen the mystery : the enclosed house encapsulates the uncanny nature of radicalism and extremism as a choice of life, freezing a time forever gone and inaccessible so that Kaczynski's motivations remain terra incognita, his borderline personality won't be framed.
The imperceptible nature of truth, frontiers between real and unreal, are reinforced by an empty plinth on the side of the shed where Thomas Friedman has placed A curse. The aura of the shed and the invisible malediction mirror each other's faith in the tangibility of the unseen.


Spider Hole © Christoph Buchel © Dazed & Confused  

Further away, we can climb inside Christoph Buchel's Spider hole and experience how to hide - like Saddam Hussein. 
Through the exhibition, escapists flee via devices - shed, hole, airvent, drain -, remain invisible from surveillance and control.


Nathaniel knows © Taro Nasu © Ryan Gander

Their disappearance suggests the existence of parallel dimensions : Ryan Gander breaks into the Palais de Tokyo as if coming from an heterotopia of wilderness, a lost hedonist paradise as the title Nathaniel knows suggests (Andre Gide, Les nourritures terrestres). 















Vorkuta © Micol Assael © Andre Morin

After the critical reference to american capitalism and Napoleon's imperialism, Micol Assael's re-enactement of a communist gulag mirrors the collapse of all systems : in the absence of the worker, Vorkuta's engine is empty of its potency and those who stood in the way of the regime have disappeared.

With Paul Lafolley who explores spatial dimensions, the escape from the constraining boundaries is total. Utopia becomes a suspension between the possible and the impossible, the invisible - or para-normal - recalls the existence of multivers and their "total non-existence". When he affirms having temporary left our physical world during an electroshock in 1961, it somehow reflects Kaczynski's enforced mind control during his C.I.A. funded studies as we wonder how much the stress tests impacted on his sanity.
The chosen year 1977 - that according to the Palais de Tokyo refers to a time when the Unabomber survives by himself in his cabane in the Montana, or when Paul Laffoley finishes his odyssey, refers above all to a time zero - the birth of punk -, an apolitical, subversive dimension and collapse of values.
Now if we go back to the beginning of the show, For the dogs (...) a prelude for piano by Erick Satie and David Allen is being played on such high frequency that it can't be heard by human ear : a sound piece, and a wave field that we didn't perceive, which does exist outside our realm of senses.

The vacuity of the Art Fair

Double fond © The Fair Gallery

For Frieze 2007, The Fair Gallery invited Aurelie Voltz to curate its stand : refusing the imposed model of commercial art environment, she turned the space into a domestic room, a jigsaw set-up inspired by the symbolics of Bachelard's Poetics of space with different artists' works interlaced around the themes of memory and intimacy.
Its title" Double fond " seemed to twist the conventional gallery's aim giving the art objects a second life. From time to time, a mother came on the stand to teach her young child to walk, a non normative, nearly invisible performance by Roman Ondak that positioned Double fond outside of the material realm.


Enigma 2 © Reena Spaulings

For Frieze 2009, Reena Spauling Gallery showcases Claire Fontaine's famous neons : their absence leaving space for a billing note.

Claire Fontaine reduces the contemporary art scene inspirations to dinner parties' conversations, a motto that borrows from Guy Debord's anticapitalist ideas and from the Situationists' fake exhibitions, a concept successfully transcended in Reena Spaulings' minimalists canvases, Enigmas 3 & 4 : Table cloth for Atforum dinner, Art Basel Miami.
Since Reena Spaulings duplicated the original concept in numerous copies, it proved financially successful - the anti-consumerist, anti-bourgeois objective also reaching a place counter-productive to what is initially claimed.

The great white hope © Marisa Argentato & Pasquale Pennacchio © T293

T293, a gallery which stand is intriguingly seductive in its minimalist choice is also part of Frieze 2009. 
T293 is designed like an empty shop by artists Marisa Argento and Pasquale Pennacchio, mounted like a platform of shelves and dressed with neo-conceptual neons. There is no work on display, the artists are represented by their catalogues : like Claire Fontaine and her detournements that challenge the notions of authorship.

The aim of the gallery is to redefine ways of exhibiting and viewing art, squeezing the viewers' imagination since the context announces an unseen content. 
One can think of the vacuity of the art fair, of the collecting of objects devoid of their essence once serving the sole purpose of being sold, their absence-presence on the booth questioning their newly gained status. 

Special thanks to T293 gallery

Gone to build a stage in the wild

C.R.A.S.H contigency © Lab of ii


In the summer of 2009, during the Two degree festival, a series of art events and installation urgently concerned with climate change and involving the public, the artist Richard Dedomenici landed a fake-aircraft in the courtyard of the Arts Admin studios. 

 Plane food cafe © Richard Dedomenici


After boarding in the Plane food cafe, passengers were encouraged to quickly eat a blend veggie curry - straight from London City airport -, while gazing at a movie showing pigeons being accidently smashed by aircrafts. Not so tasty but as fast and effective as flying and eating can be.




C.R.A.S.H contigency © Lab of ii

In the evening the Laboratory of insurrectionary imagination invited its viewers to self-conduct a radical happening in the middle of the City. 
After voting a set of actions by consensus-making, in the spirit of Reclaim the streets and the Climate Camps, they headed towards Square miles equipped with wheelbarrows and plants donated by local permaculture growers.
In the middle of Spitafield market, an area recently turned into a Business mecca with CCTV 24 hours surveillance, our crew somehow devised to set up a temporary camp with fully functioning kitchen. 
When the police finally came, the initial passive aggressive imperative to evacuate turned into a more friendly chit-chat around some freshly brewed elderflower tea, and as they left gifted with individual potted plants, it seems as if even them had joined in the party.

Energy cafe, Gunpowder park 2009 © Pilot Publishing

Later that summer, we also went to build a stage in the wild with Pilot Publishing. Their Energy Cafe was more than a resource on renewable energy and sustainability which transformed Gunpowder Park into a Temporary Autonomous Zone. 
The landscape was reclaimed as common space as locals were invited to forage plants from the surrounding wilderness : anyone who joined could cook by the fire and eat under the stars by the sound of music.