Musée Transitoire

Romina Shama is joined by sound artist Amandine Casadamont as the curators

of this first exposition.

Together they have developed a project that is intimately linked to their respective

approaches and trajectories, and they take up the challenges that constitute

our contemporary reality. They have featured practitioners of art but also

architects and authors whose work interrogates the entanglement of different

realities and their impact upon our relationship to materiality, to space, and to

present time.

The title of this first exhibit, «I would prefer not to,» evokes Bartleby, the enigmatic

character from Melville’s eponymous short story, who one day decides that

he will no longer «do» . Bartleby begins to impose a passive resistance upon his

employer, an ultra-rational notary who finds himself unable to act in response.

«I would prefer not to» is a generative exhibit. Out of the works that compose

it, it creates new works. The invited artists, architects, and authors will

compose works in an ephemeral evolving space that Romina Shama and

Amandine Casadamont call «self-generative.» The duo, who use a layering

of invisible elements such as space, time and sound as the materials for their

respective practices, are inventing a curatorial gesture in which one artist’s

work brings a new grammar to another artist’s language.

The invited artists will have carte blanche to conceive a project (installation,

sculpture, performance, video...) in situ, in the area of their choice within the

3,000 m2 of usable space. The curators will respond to, appropriate, and

mettre en abîme artists’works by filming them and recording the sound they

emit throughout the event. New forms will be born, and the exhibit will set off

down unknown and fertile paths, elevating the level of artistic dialogue.

By this curatorial gesture, Romina Shama and Amandine Casadamont propose

a new conception of the artistic exhibit, one in which the roles of the

artist and the curator become interchangeable.