WORK / LIVE 干活 Paris-Gonesse

The Social Sensibility department was born in Beijing in 2011, when the artist Alessandro Rolandi, thanks to his encounter with Guillaume Bernard, started an unprecedented and lasting experience: a new relationship with art and artists, conceived by and for the workers in their own working environment. For five years, here in Gonesse and in close collaboration with Beijing, we have developed a practice that defines a separate space within the workplace – a place for art, of course, but above all for doubt, critical thinking, memory, self-narrative, the absurd, even a non-place.

Our process follows the decentralized, non-hierarchical art practices known as social practice or socially engaged art. This zone carves out its existence within the psychological and physical reality of the company as a space for encounters and interactions that are neither necessary nor mandatory for working life. That is precisely where its meaning lies: it offers a safe and open context where people can talk in an unusual way about what they already know of life and work, and re-think and re-imagine a way of being together. This is possible because the lingua franca of this space is the language of art – not a distant, elitist discipline, but a purposeless set of manual and intellectual activities whose side effect is to sharpen everyone’s sensibility and imagination; a realm where we ask open questions, not to get straight answers, but to understand life and relationships differently.

The exhibition Parallel Impulses – Élans parallèles brings together emblematic projects from the first years of the department in Gonesse, led by Blandine de La Taille. It bears witness to the courage, talent and commitment of those who, as pioneers and without references, chose to enter this unknown territory where they knew they would be exposed.

The works were made in different ways. Some come from artist residencies, in which an artist immersed in the company for a few months invites workers to share their research (Iris Lacoudre, Mehryl Levisse, Naomi Melville and Pauline Fremaux). Others are the result of collective reflection inside the company (Calendar, Aphorisms, Manufactura, Karaoke Propaganda…). Others again are the work of a single worker, manager or employee, conceived and made by them alone (Sounkarou Dembélé, Antoine Agudze, David Rocha).

Beyond their visual and design qualities, we want these works to be seen, like art itself, as precious, precarious bridges between human beings. Suspended over a sometimes unbearable void of meaning and exposed to the pressure, speed and acceleration of contemporary life, they still stand, humbly, reminding us that with a little imagination we can still reach out to one another.