Bac à sable #3¹
Toxoplasma, Bric-à-brac

“Like everywhere else, façades whitened by thermal fulgurations crumble like wet chalk. Statues’ faces blow away in the gusts of wind, like fine ashen powder, condemning gods and famous men to anonymity. Frescoes and architectural details themselves fade. Window panes melt into glass stalactites²”.

The Bric-à-brac exhibition brings together heterogeneous processes and works. It has built itself by assembling a succession of invitations: from 19, Crac to the Juste Ici association in Besançon as part of the 12th edition of their Bien Urbain festival, from Juste Ici to the Swedish artist duet Akay and Olabo now known as Toxoplasma, from Toxoplasma to multiple facets of the territory right down to the visitors.

Toxoplasma’s practice blends into the rhythm of everyday life. It is carried out most of the time according to principles of “discreet violation³”, indexical and anonymous. She explores marginal spaces such as abandoned warehouses, empty offices and disused stores. These post-industrial environments are the backdrop for explorations, experiments and artistic creations rooted in urban space.

The artists are both historical protagonists and heirs to the urban art of the 1970s⁴, combining illegality, subversion, ephemerality and playfulness. Their posture, which embraces the techniques of parasitization, detour and telescoping, is deliberately conceived in friction with the environment of intervention in order to thwart the institutionalization that threatens previously marginal practices, and to break with the cycle of “fascination, repulsion, destruction, expiation⁵” that actors•ices in this field have been observing for several decades.

Indeed, it is in the unresolved ambiguity and dissonance of these gestures that lies the resistance to any categorization of these practices, as well as a certain poetics that reveals “an experience […] of broken windows, the wandering of bodies in motion, an attraction to perspectives without light, a romanticism of vandalism that takes as much care of things as it does of damaging them.], a fascination with the visible or invisible languages that confront the precarious matter of reality, shaping themselves with it while transforming it⁶”. Their practice, at the crossroads of urban exploration, post-industrial craftsmanship, civil disobedience and humor⁷, offers infinite possibilities for interaction between audiences and relegated spaces. By taking a contrarian look at these forgotten zones and their fertile potential, they succeed in conveying their alternative, anti-establishment essence, acting as revelators of the poetics of these heterotopias⁸.

The public space of an art center, understood as a laboratory for experimentation, constitutes another kind of playground for the duo, who are also used to the “exhibition medium”. Here, their work can take the form of in situ installations, a collection of gestures and actions performed during previous “dérives⁹”, traces of which are preserved in videos or photographs. Their works also include collages, interactive sculptures, constructions and scenographies, most of them based on found or salvaged materials. These visual creations “cobbled together” from their finds reflect not only an artistic posture, but also an art of making, as the artists in their daily lives also live by recycling and reactivating the remnants of contemporary permanent overproduction.

Indeed, the duo now live and work from three locations in the same Stockholm district, which form the common ground for their artistic productions. For several years now, following a principle of “cultural poaching¹⁰”, they have been giving new life on a daily basis to abandoned places not intended for “domestic” use, by cleaning and converting them: an old covered bus stop turned into a greenhouse, workshop and library; a tower now an office and small exhibition gallery; an advertising totem converted into a hut.

In this way, Bric-à-brac is also an exhibition conceived as a return trip between two geographies: one that the artists master and practice on a daily basis, where they live and work; the other discovered and surveyed on a one-off, ephemeral basis, host to an artistic project. Their particular approach to industrial wastelands, marginal urban areas and the dregs of consumer society was also applied to this second locality. The diverse realities of the post-industrial, Pays de Montbéliard generated a rich dialogue with their practice of public art, which “needs/provokes and creates conviction, movement, contradiction, sincere interest, dynamics, conflict, contact¹¹”.

The ensemble features elements gleaned from Montbéliard and Stockholm. Cars, bicycle frames, padlocks, models of their living spaces, images of their performance or architectural actions, all become fragments of a succession of monumental, indexical or even hidden constructions; pieces of a narrative linked to their urban explorations and to be completed by the imaginations of those who visit the exhibition. The videos produced in the Pays de Montbéliard, featuring several sequences in which the artists are seen climbing over spaces that are a priori impassable, or walking on palisades and fences, seem to condense the “spirit” of a work seeking a balance between architectural appropriation and an artistic approach situated through action. In many ways, the work is reminiscent of a certain Orwellian dystopian aesthetic that has been widely explored by artists since their early days.

Bric-à-brac is built performatively, between precariousness and ephemerality, where each space is conceived as a situation, “a moment in life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary atmosphere and a set of events¹²”. These events are artistic propositions, like a “minimal (and maximum) unit for exhibiting usual objects handled in a very everyday way, as a counter-proposal to the aesthetics of the white cube¹³”.

David Demougeot et Adeline Lépine
Curators of the exhibition

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