Almost everywhere in the world there are abandoned places, promises of modernity that history, economics or politics have shattered. The Suspended spaces collective has undertaken to project the gaze of contemporary artists onto these ghostly spaces.
Born in 2007 and based in Paris, Suspended spaces is a collective which brings together researchers, artists and theorists, around fragile and sensitive spaces abandoned by modernity. This collective is an organic structure which brings together international researchers and artists from different fields as it travels.
The initial project began on the island of Cyprus, with the discovery of the town of Famagusta, forcibly evacuated in 1974 of its Greek-Cypriot inhabitants as Turkey took up positions in the north of the island. Guarded for 40 years by the Turkish army, Varosha, a vast modern district of Famagusta that was once touristy and seaside, now presents itself, empty and ghostly, to the eyes of those who manage to approach it.
This strange city, outside of time and space, gave rise to the notion of “ suspended spaces »: paradigmatic places, whose development was abruptly stopped for political, economic, historical reasons, giving way to abandoned constructions, to an unfinished architectural modernity and yet already in ruins… The artists and theorists who participate in the project agree that these places provoke artistic and plastic reflection allowing the production of other forms of investigation.
For several years, Suspended spaces worked from several locations: Famagusta to Cyprus ; the Tripoli International Fair in Lebanon, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and whose construction was interrupted by the war in 1975 ; the site of the Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art in the bay of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, also designed by the Brazilian architect. This research was successively presented in the form of symposia (Amiens, Rennes, Beirut, Paris), residencies (Cyprus, Caen, Amiens, Beirut, Niterói), artistic productions, exhibitions (Amiens, Rennes, Niterói, Saint Ouen) and books (Suspended spaces #1: Famagusta, Suspended spaces #2: a collective experience ; Suspended spaces #3: unfinished modernity).
It is during the exhibition “ Get out of the book », organized at Mains d’Œuvres in Saint Ouen (from September 3 to October 11, 2015) that The Life of Ideas met the collective. The exhibition takes a retrospective look at the work accomplished over the past eight years and aims, as its title indicates, to extract some of the artistic proposals appearing in the three opuses published to date, to replay certain pieces produced, but also to affirm the artistic dimension of research. In this video interview, Eric Valette and Françoise Perfect present the original posture of the collective, its theoretical and plastic production, taking in particular as examples some of the works presented on the occasion of “ Get out of the book “.
The curators of the collective exhibition Suspended spaces : Jan Kopp, Daniel Lê, Françoise Perfect, Eric Valette.
Interview #1:
Interview #2:
Suspended Spaces has published 5 books:
And since this interview:
