Gongle — La Terrasse, Nanterre — Reportage — Slash Paris

Gongle — Avec ou sans casque ? @ La Terrasse : espace d'art de Nanterre from April 10 to May 9. Learn more It is a spectacle of everyday life that Gongle, whose work centers on interventions and the invention of staged encounters and shared experiences in public space, was almost bound to encounter. Over time, through projects, research and collaborations, the group’s fieldwork has produced a body of proposals ranging from collecting testimonies to staging festive events, from hands-on reflection about making the practice safer (for riders and residents alike) to raising awareness of its codes. Rather than yielding to the easy romanticism of a risky, quasi-illegal practice amplified by individual feats and inevitably flirting with the margins, the collective aims for a broader reflection. It borrows the aesthetic of bike life and redirects it toward a collective experience open to all, creating the conditions for dialogue that extends well beyond motorcycles to the ways people inhabit and negotiate their environments.

During its creative residency at La Terrasse, the collective approaches the subject through a reimagined and carefully staged visual proposal that functions both as a workspacetoward a planned parade for the exhibition’s closing, and as a display of a reflection still in formation. At the center, a working area hums with sewing machines, printers and an assortment of materials in daily use. Around it, the exhibition space presents photographs, videos, working documents and listening stations. These devices form the core of Avec ou sans casque (“With or Without a Helmet”): motorcycle helmets redesigned for the occasion are paired with headphones through which riders’ testimonies and stories unfold. Rich in meaning and bridging performance and lived practice, the helmet becomes both a vehicle for transmission and a cocoon that distinguishes its wearer through shape and color. This conceptual duality echoes that of the mask (concealing identity while asserting singularity in the public eye) a correspondence the collective readily embraces.

That ambivalence, productively generative, reflects the broader scope of this workshop-exhibition. Its alternative format allows the group to share a discourse that resists any fixed or prescriptive conclusion, instead situating creation of images, research, the construction of a tent, listening spaces, and sculptural installations built from reinvented helmets within an ongoing process. Visitors move through the space with pleasure, guided by beautifully staged photographs, yet what resonates most is the work in progress: the collective itself, available for conversation, along with traces left by previous visitors, workshops, and the spontaneous discussions that inevitably arise, even before any final presentation.

La Terrasse thus pulls off the ambitious feat of offering a panoramic view of a living inquiry while also illuminating the broader activity of a collective that foregrounds the people and places it engages. More than that, the exhibition articulates a genuine visual proposition through a practice that is not only collaborative but corrective ; finding, in situ and through exchange, the means to invent a form rich enough to reshape our own perceptions in turn.