MOLINUM

For the start of the 2023 academic year, the Centre Tignous d’art contemporain will be transformed into a mill, a place for active transformation and the creation of works of art, animated by ongoing exchanges at the heart of local social life.

In the Middle Ages, the mill was a focal point of social, economic and agricultural life. Along with the village square or cemetery, the mill was a place for interaction and gathering. Each person brings his or her own wheat – sometimes other raw materials such as hides or bark – and the miller activates the wheels and wings, using natural energy, wind or water, to produce a transformed product that meets a specific need: food, clothing…

This analogy of the medieval mill opens the doors of the art center to the four winds, and the entire city passes through it in a continuous to-and-fro. For the exhibition, each guest artist proposes a circuit between the art center and the city of Montreuil, from its specific spaces to its inhabitants.

Artists harvest the city and bring their harvest to the center. With the help of local residents, Joris Héraclite Valenzuela collects ruderal plants and creates an indoor greenhouse, like a plant map of the city. Loïs Szymczak, a top-level sportsman and professional diver, recovers architectural elements from the Maurice Thorez nautical stadium and assembles them into sculptures charged with his intimate history with the pool.

The works created for the exhibition also gather words, snippets of conversation and confessions from local residents, turning the art center into a chatterbox. Aliha Thalien invites the people of Montreuil to share with her their notes, thoughts and messages, never sent anonymously, from which she picks fragments and mixes them in a cadavre-exquis style.

Zoé Philibert invites them to confide in her in the Café-Escargot, for a friendly, anonymous chat. The phrases gleaned with the help of Théo Hillion will enable her to compose scores, which will then be played in local cafés and bars. His Café-Escargot, which replaces an old-fashioned coffee machine, welcomes the public to the art center and goes out to meet the people of Montreuil, as close as possible to everyday life.

The art center fills up with all these new harvests, aggregates them and spreads their magic across the city, like so many sacks of flour coming out of the miller’s shop. Juliette Green’s mural drawing at the art center is matched by a fresco created in situ in the outpatient surgery department of the CHU André Grégoire, for the benefit of remote or disadvantaged audiences. In a nod to the sociability of the mill, the artist uses diagrams to form a multitude of micro-narratives inspired by the close ties we maintain.

Charlotte Nicoli subverts the mill’s commercial dimension, setting up the offices of her Société Géniale in the art center. Using the Montreuillois territory as a starting point, the artist proposes a questionnaire recommending places that participants enjoy in the city, then invites them to rate not these places but their own rating action.

Molinum reconfigures the art center, adding to the artistic transformation that of the social experience of the city, aims to be a manifesto of DIWO (Do It With Others) in an exhibition context. As an artistic laboratory and social factory, the Centre Tignous d’art contemporain becomes a mill that stirs our ways of seeing the city, of walking through it, and ultimately of inhabiting it together.

Andréanne Béguin

Curator With Juliette Green, Charlotte Nicoli, Zoé Philibert, Loïs Szymczak, Aliha Thalien, Joris

Heraclitus Valenzuela