cellule516

The cellule516 is an inhabited appartment.

Here, the space, the context, were not intended by Le Corbusier to house artworks, but rather humanity, carrying out the most elemental of daily activities. 

It is a residence cell: the minimum necessary space to live “adequately”. 

The architect has predetermined our manner of living, the way the White Cube predetermines the way we perceive, sense, and understand the work of art today.  The cellule516's apparatus mixes up the protagonists – the artworks, the inhabitants/users, and the structural envelope – in a game that may subvert or clarify the fundamental definitions.

ABASALON – INHABITING CONSTRAINT is the inaugural exhibition of cellule516 – inhabited art zone.  It can furthermore be regarded as the “manifesto” exhibit for this new structure, conceived and organized as an apparatus in the Foucaldien sense: “a widely diverse ensemble, including declarations, institutions, architectural provisions, constitutional decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific expositions, philosophical propositions, morals, philanthropy...” [Michel Foucault, 1977, “The game of Michel Foucault”, Dits et Écrits T II, Paris, Gallimard.] 

Inviting the artwork of Absalon as the first resident of thecellule516 at its opening, was an obvious choice.  Indeed, in the way he appropriated the residential habitat and probed questions inherent in the notion of “inhabiting” a space, a moment, a life, to generate artwork, Absalon launched the exact investigation thatcellule516 seeks to employ.  This first edition of cellule516begins hereby a long cycle of reflection about the link between the contemporary artwork and its context (when the context is not a white cube) and about the ways in which the artwork impacts – or works variations upon – daily life, the movements and habits within the home, and the thoughts and subjective experiences of the residents.

Diverse apparatuses and materials are put in place to encourage this program of reflection and exchange, and to record it. Proposals for critical, artistic, performed or filmed readings may be included.

The publication of the ACTS OF THE CELLULE 516 will be one of the essential materials of the program.

A writer, welcomed as a resident of cellule516 on a weekly basis, will respond through fiction or narrative to the question, “What does it mean to reside in cellule516?”  This text will constitute the main body of the Acts of cellule516.

A critical text will also be published in the Acts of cellule516, to express analytical and esthetic thoughts in perspective.

And finally, the objective/subjective eye of a photographer will also be elicited and integrated into the Acts, as a further testimony to the installation.