I'm running to you to tie your shoes

For the last five years, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier have been travelling the length and breadth of France, documenting the 450 natural regions or 'pays' that make it up. Taking as their starting point the ancient historical and geographical entities such as Artois, Morvan and Béarn, they have patiently and meticulously set about describing the ways in which we take over the landscape, live in it and shape it.

The exhibition Je cours vers toi pour lacer tes chaussures (I'm running to you to tie your shoes), presented in the white gallery at arc en rêve, is devoted to this ambitious photographic adventure. Focusing in particular on the question of construction, the artists, with their characteristic curiosity, question the limits of the architectural discipline through marginal practices: self-construction, personal initiatives, bricklayers' houses or art brut are all strategies that shape, without us realising it, many of the built objects of our territories.

Although closely linked to architecture, their research goes against the grain of its scholarly meaning, and draws up an unreasoned repertoire of the often modest forms that occur in rural and peri-urban environments.
By exhibiting their Atlas of Natural Regions at arc en rêve, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier are questioning the boundaries between the architectural and the vernacular. As the title - borrowed from a Brian Eno song - suggests, they are praising a free and diversified practice of construction, in which the bricolé, the patched-up and the improvised replace the normative temptation of 'learned' architecture.

Opening: October 26, 2023, 6:30 p.m.