While many contemporary practices are interested in fiction, or even science fiction, as a tool for speculating about the future, the artists in the group exhibition L'Invention du quotidien are looking at other forms of production based on what is right in front of us, in the folds and creases of our everyday lives.

The need to address the ecological, economic and institutional crises that have come to a head in recent years has given many artists a sense of urgency to propose alternatives to the often exhausting, extractive and unsustainable systems of living and working that we are sometimes tempted to resign ourselves to, and that mutilate our imaginations.

The artists in the exhibition find new ways of being in the world in the margins and interstices of our daily lives. They are interested in common objects and tools that they divert and reappropriate, in fragile and unstable materials, in precarious situations, in changing places, in under-valued forms of work. They make tangible the multiple, unstable, entangled worlds that people silently continue to build with each other.

Collecting, recycling, re-using, transforming, collaborating, repairing, borrowing, hacking and investigating are all working methods that generate and nourish their works. Combining a desire for autonomy with lucidity, the guest artists tinker with combinative “ways of doing” to reappropriate the goods, tools and spaces that impose themselves on them. Beyond their great formal diversity, the question of transformation (of materials, tools and uses) is central to their practices.

Borrowing its title from the seminal book by Michel de Certeau, an unclassifiable figure who was at once a priest, a philosopher and a historian, the exhibition L'invention du quotidien is conceived, designed and produced in relation to its most direct environment, the city of Bordeaux. It sees the Capc institution and the urban and cultural fabric as a field for experimentation, creating objects to share with the public, collecting and re-using the materials that the urban and cultural fabric generates.

The exhibition gives voice to these artists who seek out singular, inventive, secret and sovereign joys. To make this exhibition what the American essayist bell hooks recently called ‘a space of encouragement’.

Artists : Wilfrid Almendra, Francis Alÿs, Bibliomania (Alex Balgiu & Olivier Lebrun), Andrea Bowers, Pia Camil, Jennifer Caubet, Ruth Ewan, Cao Fei, Gina Folly, Birke Gorm, Shilpa Gupta, Ane Hjort Guttu & Sveinung Unneland, Oliver Hardt, Adelita Husni-Bey, Judith Kakon, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Klara Lidén, Maider López, Enzo Mari, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yuko Mohri, Moffat Takadiwa, Daniel Otero Torres, Anri Sala, Marinella Senatore, Ettore Sottsass, Tenant of Culture, Naama Tsabar.

Curated by Sandra Patron
Assisted by Marie-Inès Tirard