Paris, France, mid July 2024
With the Olympics well underway in Paris, we present reflections from Paris a week before they started on a hot summer afternoon. The security measures and new equipments prevent people from taking paths to reach places they know. The Cadre was about to close for the summer, creating concerns for those who depend on it to pick up mail, receive information or simply charge their telephones. This made us all think about the importance of connections and passageways.
On the table was the catalogue of an exhibition that took place this year, at Christian Berst Gallery in Paris, of the Iranian artist Farnood Esbati, called ‘Lifelines’. His drawings, made of thin black lines on a white background, seemed to be an invitation for colour. On tracing paper and photocopies, lines were then coloured, painted over with translucent watercolour, and seemed to extend further, into small pathways on the table made of clay tiles, into the strips of fabric woven through the threads of the mobile loom, intertwined with typewritten stories describing fictional realities made of jokes as well as obscure truths. Or, with handwritten letters expressing strong ideas such as this title, written next to a sturdy brick archway : ‘Social bridge’.
The shape of the archway appeared here and there, as the doors of houses - small or big, half demolished or half constructed- seemed to become sacred passages, opening onto a fantastic world, where ‘Mister Potato’ could meet his friends… One of the brick houses had been built with so much care, that someone at the table said : “All it needs is an elevator !”
Words by Pauline Gaubert & Mara Gonzalez Telmo, trainees with Art Refuge in Paris.
Comments