Rough Draft, 2010

For three years the Dancing Museum takes the shape of a building site, where the problematics of collection and museology are central. After expo zéro or the “strangling time” night, brouillon continues to explore collectively the potentialities of this future institution.Since this museum project has been launched, those interested in it don’t fail to come back from such or such exhibition with a mental catalogue of the works the Dancing Museum could welcome, contain, exhibit. But in the same time as desires pile up, rises too the impossibility of seing such desires be fulfilled…. and perhaps the absurdity of the desires of completion that come with it becomes obvious. What is the use of producing a catalogue of the best works that would suit our museum, if the invention of its collection and of its museology does not lead to experimenting that will change the course of what the Dancing Museum must urgently become?

So we simply thought of an exhibition called brouillon. At the beginning, it was simply a matter of assembling a small team of curators who would choose a body of plastic artworks. Whose exhibition would be carried out by a handful of performers in charge with the permanent hanging up / taking down of the artworks, following their own ideas. In charge of organizing the confrontation of those works together. In charge with airing them or moving them about. Cleaning them. Oiling them. Touching them. Unfolding them. Reading them. Observing them. Testing them. Testing oneself physically and mentally before those works. Which would have a bone to pick with the project of a dancing museum, whether they resist the movement or call for it.A body of works set in motion for a museum’s building site. brouillon applied itself to change a dissatisfaction, an impossibility, a discomfort in front of the artworks-that-didn’t-wait-for-that-project-in-order-to-exist, into a territory of experiments of what an exhibition in motion can be. Objects-that-didn’t-ask-for-anything found themselves in a dance museum, for better or for worse. We also imagined an unexpected expansion by inviting a second time in Rennes le Pavillon, the creative laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo.

Under the shape of an active service, the nine residents (7 artists and 2 curators) have tried to achieve “the desires” of a museum, while asking what might have been their own desires if the commission hadn’t existed, or rather what kind of alternative desires arise during the carrying out of a commissioned work. After the volet of April 10th, 2010, where the works’ first results were shown, the artists were given the possibility to exhibit their own projects next to (or over or underneath) the works they were commissioned to show. And during the time of that week-end it was also possible to visit the Petit Musée de la danse that Thierry Micouin has invented with the children of the Picardie school! The slightly chaotic entirety of all those productions, as well as the proper brouillon room, formed the matter of that exhibition that wished to be, at the least, an experiment of all, objects, workes, performers, artists, visitors.… A brouillon (rough draft) of a museum in motion.