Last conference:

🗓️ Friday July 12

Discussion with Antoine Poncet: "Memories about memories".

Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. On July 27, 1900, at the height of 'statuemania' on Place de la Madeleine, opposite Rue Tronchet, a statue of Lavoisier was unveiled, a belated commemoration of the founder of modern chemistry. In 1942, this bronze, like many others, was requisitioned to be cast into a cannon? a shell? perhaps even a statue? In 2010, Antoine Poncet proposed to 'de-occult' the statue of the great man, and in 2024 to write a memoir on Lavoisier's memoirs.

🗓️ Saturday June 22

Discussion with Jules Descamps: "The unbolting of statues in the public space: towards a questioning of the durability of monuments?"

Made of stone, bronze or marble, monuments have long been designed to stand the test of time, to defy it. According to a timeless principle, statues represented a political, social or cultural figure, as well as a desire to inscribe a memory. From the early twentieth century onwards, many artists, historians and thinkers have questioned this presupposition. The example of the French war memorials from the First and Second World Wars is a case in point. Degraded both in their materiality, worn away by erosion, and in their moral significance, centred on a patriotic discourse, these memorials belong to a past that has remained past, highlighted by the critical discourse of the late twentieth century.

🗓️ Saturday May 25

Arthur Francietta, artist and Andy Rankin, curator founded the Oblivion Collection, a digital platform that catalogues works of art that have disappeared, whether they have been stolen, lost, damaged or destroyed.

During their discussion on 25 May, they will be retracing the history of Avalanche and Erosion972, two exhibitions in which works of art were sold by the gram. Arthur Francietta took fragments from the statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais in Fort-de-France, which has been attacked many times.

🗓️ Saturday May 18

- Talk by Martyna Ewa Majewska (english). Teaching at Paris Nanterre University and Paris Cité Universit . Author of a research project entitled « Alternative Monuments: Reenactment and Group Performance in Contemporary American Art ». This talk will explore works that Martyna Ewa Majewska calls « embodied countermonuments ».
- Screening of « Stonebreakers » (vostfr) by Valerio Ciriaci, 2022. Stonebreakers chronicles the conflicts around monuments that arose in the United States during the George Floyd protests and the 2020 presidential election. As statues of Columbus, Confederates and Founding Fathers fall from their pedestals, the nation’s triumphalist myths are called into question. By exploring the shifting landscapes of American monumentality, the film interrogates the link between history and political action in a nation that must confront its past now more urgently than ever.