David Coste - Laurent Mulot - Jean Denant - Yannick Papailhau

Libertalia was a pirate community in the 17th century, established, it would seem, for 25 years on the north coast of Madagascar. It was described by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe , in his General History of the Most Famous Pirates , written under the pseudonym Charles Johnson. Through its mythical and utopian character, this endeavour harbingered different movements such as Fouriérism, and more surely the agrarian collectives of Aragon in 1936 and the Zones of Temporary Autonomy set forth by Hakim Bey.

Libertalia is also the title of the show proposed by Common Place as part of le Printemps de septembre 2008. Without representing an apology for community-based thinking, but by borrowing Defoe's idea—Defoe having used his pirate narrative to freely expound his egalitarian theses and offer an example of a libertarian society.

The artists invited, David Coste, Laurent Mulot, Jean Denant and Yannick Papailhau, are neither authors of documentary works, nor conveyors of contemporary utopian thoughts. Their visually heterogeneous works are underpinned by similar intentions. David Coste is the “promoter” of strange worlds, like his project Nowhere where reality and fantasy are dovetailed. Laurent Mulot sets up art centres “in the middle of nowhere”. Proposals which evoke offbeat design agencies, but offset by the more extraordinary worlds of Jean Denant. In the case of Yannick Papailhau, the wild dreams of an architect erecting towers of Babel that are deliberately like banks. With Jean Denant, the fictional narrative power of the raw materials—a sheet of blue extruded polystyrene—becomes a creeping city. These four artists occupy the field of a nostalgic anticipation of future vestiges. Libertalia is an attempt, a blurred mapping of a moving world where there is an admixture of the make-believe and the concrete. Not a map that imposes its folds, but a planisphere made of cigarette paper.