Patrick Bouchain — Tambour battant — Salle Principale — la galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 13 → November 15, 2014

For its inaugural exhibition, entitled Tambour battant [to the Beat of the Drum], Salle Principale is proud to showcase the work of Patrick Bouchain. In addition to the exhibition, which deals with his way of interpreting laws to take concrete action and make things possible, he has generously offered to make this new space inhabitable. Patrick Bouchain will be giving a lecture during the vernissage.

Tambour Battant

Occupying a locale is an act of architecture. For the inauguration of Salle Principale, we have decided to configure the space. Is occupying a space not the best way of leaving room for others? Does the act of producing a space not involve abandoning it to its perpetual, inevitable and magnificent transformation? For us, any spatial arrangement involves reversibility. The main aim of installing the exhibition space is to create the conditions in which the imagination can open up.

The space presents many different ways of looking at the inhabited world, which exists for those who are willing to see it. The complex changes and chaotic situations that await us in the near future call for open artistic approaches. To open this clear-sighted window on the world, we will focus on what unites us. We will read and re-read some founding articles from the civil code, to try and establish whether the other world that exists is really contained within this one. We will sound the still beating drums of the reader of the law.

And since we have to prepare the first step: how about gauging once more the gap between property and appropriation? The static and the mobile? The shifting and the immutable? The solid and the liquid? Can a diffuse property exist? What do legal texts tell us about these subjects that are fundamental to any creative act? And more importantly still, what can we read there that will help us to build in alternative ways? Can the law itself be appropriated by the citizen? This first determined step will sound like a rallying call; and our fondest wish is that others will take up the call; that they will help to trigger constructive initiatives; and that they will continue to transform the world we desire, to the beat of the drum.