👉FRENCH

10TH EXHIBITION

Between formal restraint and sensory proliferation, the installation EXPLO3 emerges as a plastic manifesto of our fragmented interiority. Conceived and orchestrated by the Ateliers d’Art Contemporain, this collective work seizes upon an invariant minimalist volume—a 20 × 20 × 20 cm cube—to turn it into a vessel for an archaeology of contemporary emotions.

Where historical minimalism leaned toward the silent and the serial, EXPLO3 executes an affective subversion. Each module of this visual archipelago, shaped by over two hundred creators from more than thirty countries, becomes an echo chamber for the emotional typology established by Paul Ekman. Joy, fear, disgust, anger, sadness, and surprise are no longer mere psychological states: they turn into matter, textures, pigment strata, or collisions of mediums fixed onto six sealed faces.

The project reveals its full socio-political scope through its anchoring within iconic third places. By occupying spaces such as the Maison des Babayagas in Montreuil—a participatory, feminist, and intergenerational living space—the exhibition shifts the traditional boundaries of the institutional white cube. From autumn 2024 to spring 2026 (October 2024 – March 2026), this activist third place served as the stage for a new kind of residency, where the artwork is not merely displayed: it is inhabited, traversed, and engaged in a daily dialogue with local residents and the surrounding community.

The exhibition space ceases to be a sanctified gallery and instead embodies a place of living sociability. From Casablanca to the walls of Montreuil, by way of Paris and Nantes, this nomadic architecture gathers subjectivities without ever dissolving them. The geometric equality imposed on each participant—from the approach of Anissa Nossay to the gestures of emerging artists—abolishes any museum hierarchy. The visitor's gaze, forced to oscillate between a global grasp of a monumental mosaic wall and the microscopic observation of an individual cube, physically experiences the fundamental tension of our era: the constant tug-of-war between bodily isolation and the saturation of a connected world.

EXPLO3 presents not isolated objects, but a genuine network of plastic resonances, where the rigors of the cube act not as a cage, but as a catalyst for creative freedom and civic intersections.