________ (The dinner of the powerful)

Series of exhibitions – le Dîner des puissants with Armand Behar, Ann Guillaume and Claire Malrieux, who summon four historians’ voices and invite Olivier Marboeuf.

Stories and commemorations

«Tapis Rouge» (Red Carpet) is an apocryphal historical sketch of the development of history as history has not been, and as it could have been.

By inventing new commemorations, the Diner of the Mighty exhibits at Glassbox a program that explore different paradigms by inventing an alternative history. The writing of this alternative story is part of a new narrative that is based on history. This monumentalisation of facts inconsiderate by history is a process questioning subjectivity in the interpretation of the historical fact by those who write history. By exploiting these new perspectives, Le Diner des Puissants uses history and its narrative as raw material, reshaping it, reinventing it ad infinitum.

Through a logical sequence of causes and consequences, commemorations highlight a moment, a fact at the top of the list of great historical facts. We wish to commemorate the absences or absents from history, to propose to historians to make events around facts that do not have a re-presentation in society, that are not inscribed in the collective imagination. These ‘historians’ stories’ will be stories from next door, details, anecdotes, stories that in general cannot be written, but can be told. These ‘historians’ stories’ are at the heart of our exhibition and allow us to organise a week-long programming of several commemorative events.

________

«With memory, unlike fantasy, the mark of before and after is registered on each thing mentioned. This mark does not abolish the first enigma, that of the presence of the absent, but in a way spreads it out in time.» Paul Ricoeur
« History is a set of lies agreed upon. » Napoléon Bonaparte
« It is allowed to rape history, as long as you give it a child. » Alexandre Dumas
« The truth is stranger than fiction. » Mark Twain

LE DÎNER DES PUISSANTS

The shapes we produce refer to a story. A story to be decoded, which the spectator is led to decipher and activate. Our stories have in common that they refer to a vanished world, a world in the process of disappearance or appearance, between past and future. The objects and images we produce are under influence. They cannot be snatched from the network of forms and the history to which they belong. They are the fragments of a process that transcend them and the manifestation of a passing time. They are challenges to the very idea of the plastic autonomy of the work of art and are visible witnesses to a larger space; they are clutches. Between these shapes, there is an imaginary. In our stories, whether real or fictional, there are territories, landscapes, cities, cultures, uses, experts, practices and customs. There are signs that form worlds. In our worlds, technology plays a central part. It is an actor. For us, the tool is not separated from the concept; it resolutely belongs to the symbolic order through its formal expression. He’s not out of the world. Our stories unfold over time beyond the spatial and temporal standards imposed by the exhibition. Our stories produce objects that must be recorded, ordered, collected, stored. So the question arises as to how to show, consult, and review what constitutes our reserves.
We gather on our website the theoretical and formal advances of our exchanges and have exhibited in October 2012 at the Cité Internationale des arts de Paris.

Armand Behar, Ann Guillaume, Claire Malrieux

05.17.13> Girolamo Ramunni, historian of techniques and professor at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, tells the story of The invention of the dynamo. Zenobe Gramme is known to have invented the dynamo, but he is by no means the inventor. It was only the tool that contributed to the media coverage of the invention.

05.18.13 > David Beytelmann. Historian and philosopher. Through the revolution of the workers in porcelain factories in Limoges, he tells how the material preserves the memory of the facts.

05.22.13 > Olivier Marboeuf. Author, critic, performer, independent curator and director of the Espace Khiasma since 2004.

05.23.13 > Benjamin Ravier, historian of techniques, tells the story of the book Le théâtre des machines, a manual illustrating technical invention and definitively separating amateurs from scientists and engineers

05.24.13 > Estelle Nabeyrat, historian and curator, comments on a video by Markus Schinwald, Crusade Children..

Le dîner des puissants
Armand Behar
Ann Guillaume
Never Ending object
Claire Malrieux

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