For the exhibition Material Traces, Alexandre David created an in situ installation out of plywood that occupies the Gallery’s large window facing the atrium. At its southern-most extremity, an elevated, semi-closed space is fitted with a built-in bench. We chose to preserve this installation after the end of Material Traces, to have it coexist with the exhibitions that followed: Ignition, and this fall, Anarchism without Adjectives… and D’un discours… We have invited the artist Caroline Boileau to invest this space with a series of performances informed by the current exhibition, and also by her time spent working at the Gallery as Communications officer.

The window space and the environment created by enclosing part of the corridor are inhabited by slow gestures, offset from ‘normality’ and from a certain notion of efficiency. It means occupying the Gallery differently: sitting doing nothing rather than optimising ones’ working hours, communicating theoretical texts directly to the ear, one person at a time, playing with the visibility / invisibility of the Gallery from the atrium of the library building and using the window as an interface with the building’s users, inhabiting this habitat closely and in staggered time, like an insect rather than a human being, even slipping between its walls.

Some ellipses indicate prolonged thoughts or gaps in time. Others are a way to highlight something or simply mute what we don’t want to name. All are rich in nuance and suggest indecision, hesitation and reluctance. They emphasize waiting.