Art & Sport, an original device that puts the FRAC at Olympic time

On the eve of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the France map of the project Art & Sport says a lot about the fruitful ties that culture and sport have throughout the territory. All Regional Contemporary Art Fund (FRAC) played the game, lending plays – the authors, to name a few, are Fiona Tan, Claude Parent, Georgina Starr, Marie Denis, Zanele Muholi, or Mohamed Bourouissa – which will be shown in sports equipment, outside the walls, in perfect harmony with the ambition of cultural democratization that has animated them since the beginning.

Fabien Danesi, director of Frac Corsica and general commissioner of the «Art & Sport» label Cultural Olympiad, returns to an original device designed by the Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais, which makes it possible to highlight contemporary art differently.

What is the spirit of the Art & Sport project?

When the National Museums Meeting - Grand Palais, asked me to think about a project combining art and sport from the collections of the twenty-two Regional Contemporary Art Fund, I did not want to approach sport from a thematic angle (it was not relevant to the corpus of 32,000 works of art composing the FRAC collections). On the other hand, what seemed important to me was to recall that sport is above all a practice, just like art, and that, in both cases, these are practices led by passionate people. I organized the dialogue between these two poles by proposing to invest sports equipment, in other words places that are not devoted to creation, by seeking an audience that does not always have the time or the desire to go to contemporary art. From this point of view, the project is fully at the heart of the mission of cultural democratization of the FRAC: to raise awareness of contemporary art a public sometimes distant from museums or art centers.

How did you select the works?

The «Art & Sport» project is a true ode to diversity. The thirteen regions where the FRAC operates correspond to thirteen sports practices - dance, motor sport, hiking, horseback riding, etc., but also thirteen different contexts. The exhibitions are located in Paris as well as in Sin-le-Noble (Hauts-de-France), via Grenoble, Le Mans, Marseille, Mulhouse, Nevers, Nîmes, Pau, Saint-Brieuc, Saint-Lô, Sartène and Tours.  The ambition was to propose works that the association could most often understand «at first glance». I therefore established broad categories, with the understanding that I wished at the same time to be able, depending on the location, to multiply the forms and curatorial proposals. So there are collective exhibitions as well as monographic exhibitions, formal themes as universal subjects, such as the ocean, the animal question, time…

How do these works interact with places?

The idea was each time to choose an orientation that resonates with the place. In Sin-le-Noble, where a huge wooden frame houses the largest bowling alley in Europe, I decided to make a proposal around the trees. At the 24 hours of Le Mans, in a very classic way, I proposed an exhibition on time. In Mulhouse, we invest the largest climbing wall in France to present a polychrome exhibition, each climbing route being determined by a color. Using the place as a base allows us to recall that contemporary art, however abstract it may be, is always part of a context, that it dialogues with its environment. Another example is the wooden object of great sobriety created by Philippe Ramette, clearly reminiscent of a diving board. This object, without precise functionality will be presented at the nautical station of Pau. It will not be accessible to swimmers but will somehow be in its natural space. Our desire is to organize a conversation between a place, a space and works.

A conversation, then, that will also take place during the normal business hours of the site in question—

Yes. It’s about talking to users, investing in that infrastructure but not disturbing them. What we wanted to avoid was turning these places into museums. On the contrary: the philosophy of the project is to be part of their operating logic. It is for this reason that the duration of exhibitions is very variable. At the 24 hours of Le Mans, the village of the 24 hours of Le Mans lasts only one week, as a result, the exhibition itself lasts only one week. In Saint-Brieuc, we are investing in a disabled game meeting and the exhibition will last a few days. Conversely, in Nevers, the exhibition will be presented for almost six weeks. We have different temporalities and rhythms, it was a real adaptation exercise.

How will you organise mediation on site?

It will be different depending on the place, it’s a bit of hand sewn. Each time, there will be a room document presenting the exhibition and recalling that it is part of a vast program of thirteen events. It will be accompanied by a video presentation. But we also try to organize in each place a mediation coming from the people who take care of the place. In other words, a mediation that breaks with a hierarchical approach that would come only from «knowledgeable». I am convinced that contemporary art can emancipate itself from this perspective and create a space for dialogue and questioning.