Artistic Programme
“This will hurt you a little, he warned. You should listen to the bird. […]
– Listen to it well, listen with all your ears. It will spare you from suffering.
Will Farnaby listened. The mynah had resumed its first theme.
– Watch out! said this talking bird. Watch out!
– Be careful with what? asked Will […].
– Attention, replied Dr. MacPhail.
– Attention to attention?
– Naturally.”
« Be cautious! Present guys!» tirelessly repeats the mynah that spins around the blissful inhabitants of the ideal and self-sufficient island of Pala, in the novel Isle by Aldous Huxley (1963). As the castaway Will Farnaby soon discovers, the words of this prophetic bird truly are some sort of memento mori. They resonate in the landscape and minds, reminding one of the need to pay attention to our co-presence in the world, to the relationships that are, de facto, formed due to this co-presence, to one’s responsibility towards themselves and others, including non-humans and more broadly, the world we inhabit. For Bernard Stiegler, ”(…) attention is something that forms: producing attention in a psychic being necessarily implies participating in the psychic and collective individuation, and thus producing, with psychological attention, social attention, that is to say, social connection.” And it is precisely where the artists act. By inscribing oneself in more or less formal registers including paths, processes, or situations involving our corporeity, by invoking historical, memorial, or intimate references, they appeal to our cognitive and sensory abilities in a singular way. Like the mynah of Huxley, artists are our lookouts. Their works exhort us to slow down, glance and analyze, in order to ultimately enter into a relationship with them, ourselves, others, and the living.
Poétique de l’attention, artistic and cultural project of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, thus takes as its starting point a major work from its collection: The spirit of the grape (L’esprit du vin), a monumental sculpture by Chris Burden, created in 1994 as part of his solo exhibition at the FRAC, then directed by Nathalie Ergino. A few years later, François Quintin informed Florence Derieux of its existence, privately stored. The latter managed to have the work restored thanks to the sponsorship of Maison Pommery Champagne, where it is now on deposit. This story crystallizes a handover between a succession of FRAC Champagne-Ardenne directors, a public/private partnership, an anchoring in the regional landscape and a perspective life related issues. Knotted here, in the history of the creation, conservation, restoration and deposit of this work, is a convergence of attention without which this major and contextual creation of an American historical artist would have disappeared.
The spirit of the grape (L’esprit du vin), recreates in the form of a model, a winter landscape of Champagne vineyards, threatened by a bombardment of cobblestones gravitating in the sky, testifying to the fragility of this environment, subject to climate hazards as much as to human exactions. However, for Maïté Snauwaert and Dominique Hétu: “Vulnerability, insofar as it is recognized (…) as a new universal anthropological condition, is undoubtedly the object of care. (…) The interest in care and vulnerability draws an ethos or orientation that seems to aim at qualifying the contemporary era”. Subscribing to this reflection and starting from the principle that contemporary art offers both a critical mirror, a forward-looking vision and an agency of the care order, the artistic and cultural project of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne implements a poetics of attention to the team, artists, partners, audiences and the collection.
Ever since the 2000s, questions of participation and emancipation, inclusivity, gender, visibility of minorities and habitability of the world have gradually taken more and more space in artistic concerns. A necessary shift is at work today. Practices previously considered as marginal, minor or out of the register such as ceramics, textiles or more broadly artisanal gesture are now under the spotlight. So-called regional artists or those from peripheral areas, who were only very rarely represented in the great capitals of art, are starting to count as well. Although the path towards parity is still long, the representation of women artists within collections and teams is no longer an unthought, just like that of LGBTQIA+ artists. The issues of emergence and professionalization are now covered by specific programmes. It is no longer acceptable not to include audiences that are far from culture, just as it is no longer conceivable not to remunerate artists-authors or not to make art spaces accessible to people with reduced mobility or disabled. As for the decarbonation imposed by climate change, it is finally, a shared urgency. The art world has evolved and the practices that now reign over its institutions now incorporate a real attentional dimension.
In times of exhaustion of the planet’s resources, global warming, multiplication of wars and rigidification of thoughts, it is therefore necessary to think of other ways to conceive works and exhibitions. While the world is igniting, why and how to create today? What are the new legacies, how to disseminate and transmit them? How can the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne sensitively articulate local anchorage, regional complementarity and national and international influence? And finally, how to consider attention not as a theme, but as a performative agent irrigating the FRAC in all its dimensions and thus forge a sustainable institution? So many questions are left to investigate in order to bring out new artistic possibilities together.
Bérénice Saliou, February 2026