Åbäke - Boris Achour - Marcelline Delbecq - Alexandre Dimos - Aurélien Froment - Jean-Luc Moulène - Benoît-Marie Moriceau - Raphaël Zarka

The artists: Abake, Boris Achour, Alexandre Dimos, Aurélien Froment, Jean-Luc Moulène, Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Raphael Zarka.

For the 20th anniversary of the Atelier des Arques, the project Great Chaos and Drawers, devised by Claire Moulène and Mathilde Villeneuve, probes, between the lines, the challenges of celebration. By way of the collective writing of a short history of the Lot, in which they become thoroughly involved, the seven artists and graphic artists invited this year to residencies take the idea of celebration literally for what it is, by “illustrating” and “rendering celebrated”, in the strict sense of the term, the activities, discoveries and epiphenomena that punctuate their sojourn in the region. Through two exhibitions, one conceived in situ for the village of Les Arques and its environs, the other devised a posteriori for Le Printemps de septembre as the report of this novel experiment with, and experience of collective immersion and by way of a book which, on the basis of documents of diverse origins, develops a community-based narrative mixing, without hierarchy, the words and iconographic sources of the local population and the artists, the exhibition Great Chaos and Drawers makes a conspicuous distinction between the story great and small.

By permitting formal and critical comparisons between the mineral coagulations of prehistoric caves and the concretions of an artist like Boris Achour, between the indigenous caves of this rural region and the hollow forms of an artist like Jean-Luc Moulène or Raphael Zarka, local tourism and the research carried out by Benoît-Marie Moriceau, or alternatively the active words of one or two Lot denizens and the interest shown by Aurélien Froment in evidence, Great Chaos and Drawers plays the card of the hands-on handicap.