This exhibition has been organised by former Consortium student, Mathilde Villeneuve.

In videos and performances, Marie Reinert reveals “spaces of negotiation” in which physical bodies meet with the specific rules of a specialized area – train stations, construction sites, crossroads, malls, conference rooms. Playing the role assigned to it by the spaces that condition it, the body touches the limits of its own territory by absorbing the external constraints and thus gets to know its own outlines. Applying the implications of behaviour and importing its own rules, the body goes around, skims, removes, modifies the space and provokes repercussions. It sits on stairs, in Gare du Nord (2004), deviating the passer-by’s trajectory. In Infiltration (2005) empty conference rooms of working places are photographed clandestinely by the employee, revealing the hierarchy of these spaces. For Premiers prix (2003), the body dives and immerges into the shelves of supermarkets, its head and feet arriving at the same level where the products are displayed. Used as scale and measuring unit of the environments which it invades, the body draws the outlines of a new geography of these spaces by means of addition, uncovering or excavation.

Infiltrating and shifting the practice of archaeological layout inside an enterprise, Marie Reinert, in collaboration with two architects and an archaeologist, proposes for La Vitrine, an exhibition that takes the shape of the excavation of an enterprise office. A film in black and white shows the topological layout made by a tribe of men dressed in white. The place is progressively emptied and every object that is taken away is listed by an equipment that measures, classifies, packs. The office is mechanically scrutinized by video cameras that are positioned on its ceiling like observation cameras. Its inspection is submitted to the same logic as the one used in archaeology. The space, stripped of its substance, leaves us without scale, the enigmatic presence of the white tribe being the only counterbalance to our progressive loss of orientation. What remains of the space isn’t even its skeleton deprived of its materiality and function, it doesn’t bear marks of a past or a future any longer, and it is reduced to silence. In another piece, the artist continues with the same logic of abstraction used in the first video and proposes a next step of the excavation, this time using a light-table. According to size and nature of its objects – i.e. consumables, office materials and furniture – the hierarchical organisation of the space is displayed in a constellation of modelled objects, which have become simple spatial coordinates. Appropriating the definition of the word “topology”, Marie Reinert investigates a place that isn’t supposed to be used for this kind of activity. She thus mixes contradictory movements: the infiltration of fiction into reality and the importation of a methodology of our reality into fiction.

La Vitrine
De l’Ecole Nationale d’Arts de Paris-Cergy
24 rue Moret 75011 Paris Parmentier - Couronnes.
Du mercredi au samedi de 14h à 18h
Contact : Matthieu Clainchard (tél 01 43 38 49 65) lavitrine@ensapc.fr
Coordination : Mathilde Villeneuve (tél 01 30 30 78 98) mathilde.villeneuve@ensapc.fr
La Vitrine est membre de TRAM / réseau art contemporain Paris Ile-de-France
Information: www.ensapc.fr/lavitrine