Les centres passagers
A film by Virgile Fraisse
Presented from 19 to 26 March 2025
This video is presented in support of the National Day of Action and Strike in the cultural sector being held this Thursday, March 20th, 2025.
Virgile Fraisse examines the issues facing our societies as they grapple with socio-economic change and the new political realities it brings. Although he draws heavily on journalistic information, interviews and documentary investigations, his approach - which is not devoid of humour - tends to explore and reveal the illusory, even ridiculous but powerful nature of imaginings and languages promoted by these systemic changes. The approach adopted by the artist is usually that of a certain theatricality, of a plurality of points of view arranged in scenarios that are both light-hearted and hard-hitting, but his films, installations and performances nonetheless act as real testimonies and questionings, such as the long-term project SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe, 2015-2018), which reveals the economic and political realities of the globalised fibre-optic networks colonising the ocean floor.
In November 2020, while he was developing a new body of work around the challenges raised by the Cambridge Analytica affair, the threatened closure of the Centre d’art contemporain du Parc Saint Léger in Pougues-les-Eaux, which was hosting him for a residency, prompted Virgile Fraisse to open up a new field of filmic writing around the now contested notion of location for contemporary art. He went on to produce Les centres passagers, both an exhibition and a film which, through the fate of this now-closed venue, examines the place of contemporary art in our society, the ways in which it is funded, its relationship with politics and, indeed, the importance we give (or don’t give) to culture and art, particularly in rural areas or areas with little infrastructure.