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In this exhi­bi­tion, Anne Le Troter con­tinues her explo­ration of the mech­a­nisms of lan­guage and the power of speech through sound, writing and instal­la­tion. Laureate of the 2021 ADAGP grant ded­i­cated to the Marc Vaux Archive, she approaches the thou­sands of pho­to­graphic plates as a huge sound archive pop­u­lated by the voices of artists. From 1920 to 1970, Marc Vaux doc­u­mented the Paris art world, pho­tographing artists and models, works of art, exhibits, salons, artists’ work­shops, gal­leries, cafés, balls, par­ties as well as a great number of admin­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments. With nearly 130,000 pho­tographs, the col­lec­tion held at the Pompidou Centre’s Kandinsky Library offers an image of the Parisian art scene as a hybrid and transna­tional centre of cre­ation. It bears wit­ness to a day-to-day reality fed by indi­vidual and col­lec­tive his­to­ries; widely diver­gent from the nar­ra­tive of a homoge­nous moder­nity col­lected around a few heroic fig­ures.

Of the five thou­sand artists rep­re­sented, Anne Le Troter is inter­ested in the more anony­mous fig­ures, activists and fed­er­a­tors; such as Marie Vassilieff, who opened a “pop­ular can­teen for artists and models” in 1914, Louise Hervieu, who founded an “as­so­ci­a­tion to estab­lish the health booklet” in 1937, and Marc Vaux him­self, who hosted a “mu­tual aid centre for artists and intel­lec­tuals” in 1946. Inspired by the detours of the lives of artists involved in care, Anne Le Troter com­posed a sound play in which she gives voice to poly­ac­tive artists, care­givers or patients, art ther­a­pists, models, nurses, paramedics, resis­tance fighters. Sounding their words in the inter­stices of mute images, she com­posed con­ver­sa­tions among them about their health, their work-related ill­nesses, their mobi­liza­tions, the mate­rial con­di­tions of their lives … To do so, she invited living art workers – Victoire Le Bars, Ségolène Thuillart, Simon Nicaise, Nour Awada, Agathe Boulanger, Martin Bakero, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Simon, Eva Barto and Juliette Mailhé – to lend their voices and talk to the “not-dead” artists of the Marc Vaux col­lec­tion – Suzanne Duchamp, Henri-Georges Adam, Marie Vassilieff, Max Beckmann, Joy Ungerer, Jean Cocteau, Anne Chapelle, Bessie Davidson, Madeleine Dumas, Ossip Zadkine, Claudette Bergougnoux, Kiki de Montparnasse, Paul Éluard, Joséphine Baker... The var­ious pro­tag­o­nists of this sound piece nav­i­gate through the frag­ments of a French his­tory of art and of health­care poli­cies for artists; they observe both their affil­i­a­tion with the gen­eral social secu­rity system and their social inse­cu­rity (no mater­nity leave, nor leave for work-related ill­ness or injury); they recount the strug­gles of art workers, retrace the advent of the health booklet, listen to the gaffes of old age insur­ance, and allow them­selves to be guided by mutual aid, pig­ment and medicine. Through their con­ver­sa­tions, the people who Anne Le Troter calls “the vol­un­teers” com­pose a new trans-his­toric iden­tity. Together, they develop a med­ical auto­bi­og­raphy of a hybrid col­lec­tive body.

At Bétonsalon, this poly­phonic nar­ra­tive coils itself into the art centre: voices run along fragile metallic ram­i­fi­ca­tions crop­ping out of flaws in the floor; net­works of audio cables cas­cade softly from the ceiling to con­nect with tiny, shell-less speakers and come to caress a sound floor; breathing and bodily fluids make the glass sur­faces vibrate. This exposed sound mechanics is incar­nated in the mate­rial of the space as though by a vast, ampli­fied, carnal envelope. The sound con­duc­tivity is every­where fragile, requiring par­tic­ular atten­tion, from the feet to the ears. As you listen, words mingle with the noises of this recon­structed col­lec­tive body and the ambient sounds adhere to the words. These two sources of sound might appear to be oppo­site – one dis­cur­sive, the other noisy – but by lis­tening atten­tively, we see that they change through con­tact with each other; the meaning blurs and the noise takes on meaning.

Biography

Anne Le Troter (1985) is an artist based in Paris. It was after writing two books L’ency­clopédie de la matière and Claire, Anne, Laurence that she began to work cycli­cally on the way specific groups began to express them­selves, by cumu­lating exhi­bi­tions, (often sound plays) that went on to become written works. Anne Le Troter thus invites groups of people, like ASMR artists to work with her (L’appé­tence, sound play, 2016 Salon de Montrouge and Palais de Tokyo Prize). After working on a form of com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of speech—in a cycle of sound instal­la­tions focusing on the figure of the tele­phone sur­veyor, a cycle spread over two solo and one group exhi­bi­tion (Les mitoyennes at La BF15 in Lyon in 2015, Liste à puces at the Palais de Tokyo in 2017 and Les silences après une ques­tion at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne in 2017) – today Anne Le Troter’s work tends more towards the antic­i­pa­tion genre. Exhibited at the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the Rennes Biennial, Le Grand Café con­tem­po­rary art centre in Saint Nazaire, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Centre Pompidou, the artist has begun a new writing cycle around the idea of biog­raphy, fic­tion and utopia. In 2019, she was awarded the Villa Kujoyama Prize in Kyoto, in 2021 the Mondes Nouveaux grant as well as the ADAGP– Bétonsalon research grant in asso­ci­a­tion with the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. After the exhi­bi­tion Les Volontaires, pig­ments-médica­ments at Bétonsalon, in 2022 her work will be shown at the Institut d’art con­tem­po­rain in Villeurbanne and at Ygrec in Aubervilliers.