Exposition “THEY”

The THEY exhibition attempts to produce a diffracted image of youth, a community without a community, evolving in a dissolved, precarious world where referents circulate freely, without hierarchies, beyond generational issues and gender groupings.
She looks at how languages and forms are born, how the foundations of a vocabulary are invented, a new way of making art, of being 'contemporary'. These contemporary visions presuppose acts of possession, disappearance and ventriloquism, the emergence of a multitude of practices and social, friendly, political and aesthetic experiments that act everywhere and oppose the inertia of walls.
In this way, the exhibition establishes human cartographies, a kind of moral fable that could incorporate all sorts of affects, relationships of identification or indifference. Forms of disappearance, a spectral base that leads us, in a way, to all those worlds where virtuality reigns.
A place temporarily occupied by "wild young people", dissidents from systems and borders, who make forms, bodies, vehicles, multiplicities; who want life, not capital, to reproduce itself.

THEY is not us, it is already the statement of a lack, of a distance.
Since then, and this exteriority, how can we express the condition and creativity of a virtualised collective body? How do we get round the dead ends of the folklore of difference, innocence and original inventiveness? How can we avoid doing sociology against a backdrop of existential and aesthetic crisis? Should we abandon our senile passion for what moves, what lives, what rebels? How can we think of this creature between two states, which would not be content simply to fix itself in its unaccomplished forms, but which would be, so to speak, so abandoned to its own youth, so unspecialised and so powerful, that it would turn away from any specific destiny or milieu to stand solely on its own immaturity and its own ignorance.

The THEY exhibition is the final chapter in the research project 'The Raving Age. Histories and Figures of Youth", directed by Vincent Normand, Philippe Azoury and Shirin Yousefi, as part of the Master's programme in visual arts at the ECAL, Lausanne Cantonal School of Art.
Over two years, the programme has been developed around a range of cross-disciplinary production, analysis and workshop activities, involving a large number of artists, thinkers, writers and Master's students.
The www.theravingage.com platform records all these exchanges and conferences.
The exhibition thus reflects an unprecedented experience of co-production and collaboration between a museum and an art school, between the guest artists and the students, who were able to get involved at various points in the exhibition process, including design and communication (Lorenzo Benzoni and Luca Frati), the design of the scenography with David Douard, a reality TV show directed by Sara Sadik, and the performative work by Gabriele Garavaglia.
Some pieces were produced specifically for this context, such as those by Julien Ceccaldi, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Mélanie Matranga, Gabriele Garavaglia, Exotourisme (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Perez) and Jill Mulleady.
Other existing works were chosen for their specific resonance with the project, including those by David Douard, Morag Keil, Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel and David Wojnarowicz, a true figure and haunt of youth.