le magasin (un opéra) fabienne audeoud

LE MAGASIN (UN OPERA)

ACT 1 : PRE-LOVED BROWN AND DARk BLUE JUMPERS
Made possible by a grant from Mécènes du Sud Montpellier Sète in Brussels, Sète and Marseille, 2021

The Jumper Shop (‘le magasin de pulls’) is an exhibition, a shop and an opera.

The plot is based on Baudelaire’s flaneur becoming a woman doing her shopping.

The shop soundtrack turns the space into a stage, and viewers into actors and/or client. (Music available on most music platforms, such a music.apple, spotify...)
The garments on sale are navy blue and brown jumpers.They are basics or classics and represent quality and a timeless ‘bourgeois’ good taste. Navy blue is one of the colours of power (police, gendarmerie, marine and business) and therefore looks good on everybody. Brown jumpers require a brand and narrative to become trendy.The lighter the colour, the more bourgeois it becomes : the nude has its nuances.

The cardigans, jumpers and sweaters on display are (more or less) pre-loved, worn out, shrunk by the washing machine, with large and small holes and of different qualities. Most of them come from les Puces de Montreuil, a fea market in the suburb of Paris soon to be taken down for Olympic sport competitions.

They operate as performative markers, like the French verb ‘porter’ taking on different meanings depending on context:‘porter un message’ (to convey a message),‘porter le nom de son père ou de son mari’ (to take one’s father or husband name),‘porter une charge’ (to carry a burden),‘porter sa croix’ (to bear one’s cross),‘porter un personnage à l’écran’ (to perform, to embody) ‘porter un coup’ (to strike).‘Une voix qui porte’ is a voice that carries well.

They dress up a discourse where tradition and its social signifiers are reproduced, re-intepretated, perfomed. If the jumpers are not particularly interesting visual objects they operate as pre-texts to the gestures and actions embodied by the artist/sales assistant and the audience. Doing ones shoping online, in a shop, bu turing the pages of a catalogue is compared here to contemporary art practices (productions, theoretical practices, critical statements, calls for projects and pdfs of proposals for juries to choose from...)but also to many other contemporary cultural and social practices, such as online meetings politcal positions and/or outrages.

This project has also benefited from a recidency by the Confort Moderne (Poitiers).

KOMPLOT, BRUSSElS (19th - 20th June 2021)
In anticipation of the closing down if the Anderlecht space, the shop was reduced to the exhibition of one jumper. Below: View from the outside, and Loic Vanderchtichelen and Olivier Foulon taking pictures.

SETE, RUE PIERRE SEMARD (3rd July to 25th August)
Shop installed in an artist studio in a popular street in Sète, south of France. Photos Johan Courtroy