From this position of love – claiming the value of artistic practice as deep presence in the reopening of le Magasin CNAC
Elisa Fuenzalida
Arts of the Working Class
2023 (EN)
Otherworld Communication, exhibition view La Position de l’Amour, Le Magasin CNAC Grenoble ©Aurélien Mole
Céline Kopp leads Le Magasin - Centre National d’Art Contemporain (CNAC) into its new phase. Kopp’s approach starts with love as theorized by bell hooks — which is to say, as a practice — recognizing “love” as an action that takes place in a web of temporalities and subjectivities: memory, present, and imagination that makes futures possible. This art center is located in Grenoble, a city open to participatory processes, cultivating collective deliberation in more than one sense. Within this tight weaving of relationships, Le Magasin presents itself as a pioneering institution, the “prototype,” as Kopp puts it, after which French contemporary art spaces of the last 40 years have been modeled. Still, the excessive pressure that the pandemic added to consecutive crises already afflicting the institution led to its closure. Shutting down was a difficult decision; one that could have jeopardized many jobs and the continuity of a vital space in the social fabric of the city. Radically, the board of funders elected not only to project a reopening, but to maintain all workers’ salaries at 100 percent until the reopening could take place. This gesture translated the confidence in the space and the recognition of the value of the workers into concrete actions, beyond their productivity, beyond whether there were activities, because there were none.
Kopp’s first actions upon taking over management of Le Magasin are indicative of the spirit that can be perceived in the exhibition marking the beginning of this new chapter: articulating the material process of reopening with local collective initiatives, like a commission to reorganize the museum’s interior spaces with studios Cookies and Stromboli Design and a commission to redefine Le Magasin - CNAC's graphic charter with Brussels design atelier Alliage, summoning workers and opening the space to artistic practice. In Kopp’s own words: “The opening was not thought from a manifesto but from testing and exploration. If there are new formulas, they will emerge from practice.”
La Position de l'Amour (“From This Position of Love”) (19 November 2022 - 12 March 2023) is the title encompassing the first movements of this new cycle, and refers to both a group exhibition and a program in alliance with the art and design school École Supérieure d’Art et Design (ESAD) Grenoble-Valence, which includes a solo exhibition of works by Binta Diaw, a residency program premiering with Cindy Bannani, and a series of performances and conferences.
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Prune Phi’s Otherworld Communication (2021 - ongoing), a video installation that is part of a larger project, connects with this animist line, not only in terms of mundane economies that transcend the material, but also in the way in which the drifts of traditions — both Vietnamese and capitalist, where the latter is explored as imposed. In this film, the belongings of the deceased are burned for their transcendence into the immaterial world, but they no longer consist of classic objects of everyday use. Rather, they are imitation Louis Vuitton bags, laptops, and cell phones. Phi examines these derives while questioning her own position in the context of the diaspora, for whom she speaks; the silences she believes it necessary to besiege; what specters to let rest, and what it is up to her generation to shake up.”