Annabelle Ténèze is an Archivist-Paleographer, Chief Curator of Heritage, and Director of the Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse. She was curator at the Musée national Picasso-Paris (2006-2012) and director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart (2012-2016).
Her research interests include what defines historical and current scenes, and the reasons for their visibility and invisibility.
She has thus co-curated group exhibitions of French women artists such as Peindre, dit-elle, in 2015 and 2017 (Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, Musée des Beaux-arts de Dôle; with Julie Crenn), and African (L’Iris de Lucy. Contemporary African Women Artists, in 2016-2017; with Orlando Jinorio Britto; Musac, Leon, Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art and CAAM of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) or Beyond What We See. Once upon a time, once upon a future at The Abattoirs (with Missla Libsekal) in 2020.
She has also curated a number of monographs of remarkable artists that emerged in the 1960s, such as Carolee Schneemann (2013, at Rochechouart), and at The Abattoirs in Toulouse, Daniel Spoerri (2017), Hessie (2017), Jacqueline de Jong (2018), Peter Saul (2019) and Marion Baruch (2020).
Imagine you are in a museum; what do you hear?
“Imagine you are in a museum; what do you hear? 1This sound work by Bhavisha Panchia, from 2020, was presented as part of the Traits d’union.s public programme at Manifiesta 13, Marseille. It was reproduced as part of the Sommet de Septembre festival organized by Les Abattoirs and co-directed by Missla Libsekal and Annabelle Ténèze with the support of Evelyne Toussaint “Créer les archives de l’art. Il était une fois, il sera une fois. Le contexte africain contemporain,” 17-18 March 2021.”: this is the title of a sound piece by the South African artist Bhavisha Panchia that will be broadcast online in a few days by Les Abattoirs, Museum – Frac Occitanie Toulouse, the establishment of which I am lucky enough to be the director. Alongside a second piece installed in the exhibition area 2Nothing to Commit Records, 2020, est présentée dans l’exposition Au-delà des apparences. Il était une fois, il sera une fois, 15 décembre-31 mai 2020 qui rassemble 8 artistes africaines., she goes on the search for a potential audience on social media with the hope of reaching those close to and far from the museum, whatever the reason for this distance, thanks to the content and mode of broadcast. This perspective of approach also emerges from the way in which the artist has combined, linked, brought together and created collisions between the historical and contemporary sound archives that she has collected and selected. Therein, the artist digs up buried voices, words and music. More than just associations, they are dissonances that spring up from these assemblies, which in turn give rise to new senses that pave the way to alternative ways of listening. In another way, this work surely pursues the now well-known history of the political and aesthetic power of the montage. During the First World War, the Dada movement invented the photomontage in response to the absurdity of war and the failure of culture to prevent it, thereby founding the protest potential in art of what situationists called détournement 3Guy-Ernest Debord, Gil J. Wolman, « Mode d’emploi du détournement », Les lèvres nues, n°8, mai 1956.. Directly extracting pieces of reality from any medium to include them in a piece, from prints and photos to films and videos, and even virtual material nowadays, would be a means if not to reconcile art and life, then at least to objectify the world. When developed as an “anthology”, an assembly combines both the radical and disruptive power of cut and paste and the force of research work: collecting archives, analysing them, creating a long-term collection, such as the “atlas 4Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’œil de l’histoire, 3, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2011, 382 p.”, Bhavisha Panchia’s proposal that integrates the double dimension of time — both of the archives and of the sound piece’s means of writing and listening to time. Both in continuity and in a break with the encyclopaedic method, “knowledge through montage 5Thomas Golsenne, « La connaissance par montage », Acta fabula, vol. 14, n° 2, février 2013.” also makes it possible to escape from codified orders to, in return, “exhibit the disorder 6See Georges Didi-Huberman, op. cit.” of the world. Because listening, just like watching, is learnt, and this deconstruction-reconstruction of the piece in Bhavisha Panchia’s compilation emphasizes the history of the sounds, their geopolitical and ideological implications, more precisely in this case the connection between the museum and colonial history. By questioning the materials of history, she offers a glimpse of the world in pieces and by pieces, in a reordered disorder that could be more significant than a linear presentation of history, giving greater access to stories thanks to “evidence through art 7Evelyne Toussaint (dir.), Postcolonial/décolonial. La preuve par l’art, Toulouse, PUM/Les Abattoirs, 2021. Prologue by Annabelle Ténèze, epilogue by Zahia Rahmani. Compilation of postcolonial/decolonial contributions from three annual journals, organized jointly by Les Abattoirs and Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès between 2016 and 2018.”.
Juggling her work as a researcher, producer, curator and artist, Bhavisha Panchia is an “artist-researcher” — a figure that plays an essential role in our institutions. By calling into question the very authority of discourse on art and material and non-material culture, she shines a light on the issues of authority, of visibility and invisibility, of possession and dispossession, which echo those faced by the museum to which she offers a revealing mise en abyme through her art. Who do we hear and who do we not hear there? Who would we like to hear in a museum? Who may still speak that we have not yet heard? What modernities can we hear? What modernities would we like to hear? How can we welcome and make all the voices heard there, without forgetting the specific context of historical and research work, to undertake a complex yet serene dialogue that can let all the possible nuances shine through? Where do the words come from? How are they transmitted? By bringing possible voices together on the same level, she also gives the floor and an audience, by contrast, to those who do not usually find a place for their words and puts forward ways of establishing new links thanks to the “poetics of relation 8Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World (trans. Celia Britton), Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020: “And I call Poetics of Relation this possibility of the imagination that leads us to conceive of the elusive ‘worldness’ of such a Chaos-World, at the same time as it allows us to pick some detail from it, and in particular to sing the praises of our place, unfathomable and irreversible. Imagination is not a dream, or the emptiness of an illusion.””, which do not ignore or take pleasure or discomfort in what they can cause.
Since their appearance and gradually over the course of their not-so-longstanding history of just a few centuries, art spaces and museums have sought to define themselves, conceiving successive models 9Citing, among others, the temple-museum, the laboratory-museum, the forum-museum or the workshop-museum, etc.. Recently, they have begun to face their own paradoxes. Museums, which were built as places to promote knowledge of the world by preserving the exceptional, the beautiful, the rare or the representative, have omitted large parts thereof due to their inherited classifications, thereby failing to represent “the world in its entirety 10Édouard Glissant, op. cit.: “I call Chaos-World the current clash of so many cultures set ablaze, pushing each other away, disappearing, but still persisting, sleeping or transforming themselves, slowly or at lightning speed: these bursts, these explosions whose principle or economy we have not yet begun to understand, and whose trajectory we cannot predict. The Whole-World, which is totalizing, is not (for us) total.”.” In spite of the desire to explore, a universalist and humanist ambition, the way of thinking about the world in a museum is ultimately restricted and viewed through the prism of the place of origin, in the light of the societal model that created the museum — i.e., originally Western, generally masculine, predominantly heteronomous and physically able. Nonetheless, all museums—from natural history museums, antique museums and museums about society to fine arts museums, including the more recent contemporary art museums—have proven their worth both as tools to preserve and transmit knowledge and as spaces for sharing and discovery, and evidently as generators of emotions, delight and pleasure. How can we bring these two realities closer together? How can we understand pieces and knowledge in order to better transmit and share them? How can we transmit and challenge them to better respond to current social questions and include everyone while also conserving their diversity, difference and history, all working together? Institutions mainly seek to hear in order to make other voices heard, the forgotten, misunderstood, not yet translated, quiet and fragile voices. At the same time, they also aim to adjust their own voices and words in a complementary movement, in a new polyphony, perhaps in a new gentleness; in any case, to not ignore the voices that are raised.
To change the way we speak, we must also learn new languages and adjust the way we express ourselves. Many terms are used to refer to this revolution in perspective and speech, which was undertaken several years ago and will continue for some time: “decentralisation”, “globalisation”, “gender studies”, “diversity”, “intersectionality”, etc., without forgetting the complex realities evoked by the terms “postcolonial” and “decolonial”. These words do not have the same history and do not cover the same realities, in accordance with the different geographic and cultural areas. How can we put these discourses into perspective while also consolidating them and opening up new, plural and different ones? Many other fields of study also have a place alongside art in our institutions. These questions raised by postcolonial, gender, sociological, philosophical, anthropological, economic, psychiatric, legal, or even environmental studies—related to history and art history, of course—are constantly with us. For institutions, the challenge is knowing how to draw responses from these studies and integrate them into daily life, not just theoretically but in concrete terms. Beyond the different definitions of the museum, its place is characterised as a meeting point for both works and people, but also as a place of diffusion. Institutions that make their voice heard in the public space must also take care of the voices collected, conserve them, protect them and contextualise them through the accuracy of research and solid mediation and theoretical analysis tools, all without raising a voice in the polemic.
Currently, in the midst of the pandemic and while Les Abattoirs is closed and virtually empty due to the health situation, broadcasting Bhavisha Panchia’s piece also appears to be a paradox and a response to the silence that has enveloped the exhibition spaces by means of the artist’s voice and poetry. We now only rarely hear the voices and sounds that we should normally hear in this space. The voices of those that normally inhabit the museum have disappeared, the voices of the teams that bring it to life, of those that inhabit it from time to time or regularly such as visitors of all ages, groups of children, groups of friends, families, couples, or those that visit alone. Of course, we cannot forget the people for whom the museum is a home, a place of production and diffusion, a meeting point: not only visual artists, but also all those that come to meet them, musicians, actors, dancers, etc. The sound of activities, exchanges, films and video pieces normally overlap with these voices; under normal circumstances, a contemporary art museum is never silent.
We hope that this current and circumstantial silence will be as short as possible. To make the museum first and foremost the institution of artists and the public, we must make it a meeting point. A place for speaking, discussion and exchange regarding what we see for art professionals, regulars or first-time visitors regardless of their age, gender or origin, as well as for those who are unaware of this place’s very existence. The museum must be capable of awakening everyone’s awareness of art, the reality that art is to be shared by and belongs to us all in terms of knowledge, appreciation and practice, and even more so for those who lack or have lost their confidence. If we try to break the current silence through digital broadcasts of voices and animated images or through writing, this means should not make us lose sight of the fact that voices come from all around and a museum’s challenge is to echo them. Which voices do we or should we hear when we move around a museum? Which voices do we hear when we encounter the pieces, documents and archives? It is also important to not just question what we will display or see, but also what the person that visits the institution will hear and therefore understand. Staying with the metaphor of sound, it is about looking in a more attentive and different manner to better discover and understand even whispered sounds, to leave space for polysemy and linguistic diversity on the tape. The museum—extended to include all spaces of art, culture and research—must take on the role of a “sound box”; it must keep subdued, complementary and clashing associations alive and even accentuate them so that it both conserves and echoes outside debates in an open, protected and free space. It must also be an “amplifier of life”, of intensified humanity and knowledge, of emotions, of both anger and reassurance, of both calm and revolt, of both joy and sadness, the entire compiled and accepted spectrum. The museum—of which we do ask a lot, but of which we must ask a lot as a public service—can indeed become an amplifier of knowledge and feelings in everyday life and in the long term, a space that is protected and open to all discussions without taboo. In short, to create art like we create society.
Despite the scope of this task, we must also be sufficiently modest to consider that it is in progress, that we are learning and experimenting, that space and time are our partners in this reflection. The words Le temps d’une rencontre ou pour toujours [The duration of an encounter, or forever] adorn the walls of Les Abattoirs along the library façade, which is a public space visible from the street. These illuminated words state that we take what we discover with us, and that this shapes us. This piece is part of a project conceived and produced for our institution by Joël Andrianomearisoa in 2017. Since this time, the artist, the team at Les Abattoirs and I have been leading a long-term project with the common thread of reflection on the limits of art and the museum or, more precisely, how to question and exceed these limits. Conceived as a global project, the first stage was Sentimental Products by Joël Andrianomearisoa, a piece that evolved over the course of the exhibition and the accompanying events. At the beginning it was an installation, a real fake shop where everyday objects (found or ludicrous objects, exclusive creations, ready-made items, etc.)—always selected by the Madagascan artist—were created or distorted by their titles, but always for their sentimental value. This installation, completed with posters, creations on social media and a “Sentimental Party” held on Valentine’s Day, was certainly more fully executed by the dispersal of the Boutique sentimentale on the last two days of the exhibition. In other words, the boutique’s appearance finally became a reality when everyone, in advance or by chance during their visit, could buy one of the sentimental objects for a modest price. “Even if the objects are not free, the sentiments are” and the elements of the initial project thereby continue their life of exhibition in the private lives of visitors, who sometimes became collectors without knowing it. On the contrary, the dessert inédit, which was black like a large part of the artist’s piece and conceived alongside the team of the restaurant at Les Abattoirs, only existed during the specific exhibition dates. It was both this time frame and the unprecedented visual and gustatory creation of this dessert that moved it into the field of art, and even into the very history of art and cuisine when the creator of Eat Art, Daniel Spoerri 11Daniel Spoerri: A table aux Abattoirs. Daniel Spoerri Eats at Les Abattoirs, Milan, Fondazione Mudima; Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, 2017., ordered and ate it. The Madagascan artist also invited visitors and the team from Les Abattoirs to look at the museum differently, to see all its spaces as potential art spaces from the restaurant to the bookshop, including the courtyards and even the city’s streets, giving sense and words to the establishment’s forgotten spaces from the staircases and the reception area to the lifts, including the toilets. Through his poetry affixed to the walls, through his love letters slipped into library books, he took us on a sentimental and artistic treasure hunt, leaving traces of his visit that have not since been erased. This long-term dialogue that overcame the usual time-related and geographical constraints of display or exhibition continued in the following years with a navigating piece aboard a barge, interventions in a department store window, an installation in a castle, etc. To this, we can add the support of Les Abattoirs for the Madagascar Pavilion in the Venice Biennial in 2019 by Joël Andrianomearisoa, the only addition in the standard field of art yet just as unprecedented since this country had not previously participated in this event. In 2021 in just a few months’ time, a project in the airport of Toulouse will represent the next stage of this questioning of the time and space of the museum, as well as of the necessary understanding or labelling of a creation as a “piece” in its mediation. For example, it is questionable whether many of the people that saw the “barge-piece” sailing on the Canal du Midi realised that they were looking at a proposal of a museum. Does this change their experience and their relationship with the poetry and physical form that they discovered?
“Act in your local area, think of the entire world 12Edouard Glissant, Philosophie de la relation, Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 46.”: few sentences summarise our current social challenges, especially those affecting our cultural institutions, as well and as accurately as this quote from Édouard Glissant. How can we reconcile the history of a place, of a collection, and turn this anchor into a strength all while deconstructing this history? How can we ensure that the people who have not always been welcomed by these places participate in them? How can we think of our local area while acting in the entire world, particularly within modern and contemporary art museums that mix both history and the present, and also aim to contribute to the future? How can we think globally within the museum and make the world therein? Surely by letting the world into the museum and by leaving it, in a double movement, by playing with the range of actions permitted in the current circumstances faced by Les Abattoirs due to the double mission of two institutions fused into one: a museum and a regional contemporary art collection (FRAC). Surely also by recalling the fundamental principles of the museum, which mixes science, knowledge, perspectives and emotions without any form of hierarchy.
Being an amplifier of life also means converging with people’s daily lives, in their personal, family and collective history from the past and present, and also bringing territories together; that is to say, acting both within and outside of the museum, in an inside-outside that is certainly the world, but also a set of spaces. Acting in one’s local area also means being sensitive to the history of the people surrounding the museum’s history. This involves rethinking the content and format of projects. The responses to be given are surely related to the artistic and scientific content and the formats of the project, as well as the manner of exchanging with the public. In 2019, Picasso and the Exodus. A Spanish History of Art in Resistance 13Exhibition at Les Abattoirs, 15 March – 25 August 2019, as part of the Picasso-Méditerranée programme launched by Musée national Picasso-Paris for the 80th anniversary of La Retirada. Curated by: Emilie Bouvard, Géraldine Mercier, Valentin Rodriguez, Annabelle Ténèze. was the first exhibition to explore the link between Picasso and exile and the consequences of the Spanish Civil War in the very long term. It highlighted that Pablo Picasso, who settled in Paris in 1900, went from economic migrant to political exile when he could no longer return to Spain, and then made the symbolic and political choice to never return. Thanks to considerable archival work, it also analyses the personal, artistic and historical upheaval that he shared with several of his artist contemporaries and an entire population. Starting, of course, in 1937—one year after the start of the Spanish Civil War and while he was working on Guernica for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris—the exhibition also focuses on the end of the war in 1939 when 500,000 Spaniards crossed the Pyrenees before moving into refugee camps with abominable living conditions. It recalls how, after the Second World War, the continuity of the Spanish situation strengthened Picasso’s political engagement against Francoism and for peace both in his art and his support for Spanish exiles, particularly artists. Picasso was surrounded by more than forty of his contemporaries—artists in exile, not only Spaniards but also people who were close to and supported him 14Citing Óscar Domínguez, Apel.les Fenosa, Luis Fernández, Pedro Flores, Carles Fontserè, Julio González, Roberta González, Hans Hartung, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Joan Miró, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, Remedios Varo, etc.—and we were reminded that his artist nephews J.Fín (Josefin Vilató) and Javier Vilató also spent time in internment camps. It also evoked artists that created while detained in a refugee camp or while working there as a nurse such as the photographer Friedel Bohny-Reiter. Likewise, it brought together, far from any question of glory, drawings of unknown people inside or leaving camps that were ordered from artist internees by the mayors of small towns such as Septfonds, where a camp had been set up, in a show of economic and common ideological support for revolutions (one of the themes proposed to them was the commemoration of the French Revolution). The exhibition dealt with long-term exile, the theme of the cultural, artistic and humanistic resistance that followed in the post-war period when militant exhibitions of exiled artists and support committees were organised. Pledging to not return to Spain until it had been freed from Francoism, Picasso died in 1973 without visiting his homeland again: the ultimately banal and surely painful destiny of an exile, even though he was also the most famous artist in the world. Putting unknown or poorly known artists, nurses and interns on the same level, contextualised by documents and contrasted with some 20 pieces by modern-day artists, was a founding choice, as was the choice to mix international and local history, since Toulouse was the city that experienced the most profound cultural and social transformation as a result of this exile to France 15Tellingly, Les Abattoirs is located in a working-class neighbourhood near the Varsovie Hospital (now known as Joseph Ducuing Hospital), founded to accommodate Spanish exiles, and where works by Esther Ferrer were exhibited.. Picasso and the Exodus. A Spanish History of Art in Resistance was a historical and moving exhibition that united since it revealed the resources of artists locked up in internment camps and their need to create, and it also put current migrations into historical perspective by means of a historical exodus. It was conceived as a social and territory-related project. In parallel, the Je suis né étranger [I was born a foreigner] programme was rolled out for the first time in 2019 throughout the Occitanie region, which is also an area of migration. To commemorate the anniversary of La Retirada, this mass exodus of 500,000 Spaniards over the French-Spanish border, 70 artists (an equal number of men and women) of over thirty different nationalities and whose work was displayed at 25 locations in 25 exhibitions provided a perspective on migration in the present day. Four themes were defined—“born in exile”, “scenes of exile”, “walking to stay alive” and “the crossing”—and the projects invaded an extremely varied range of spaces and were constructed in close collaboration with the partners, in accordance with each personal and territorial history. Conceived as an artistic, cultural and social project, the cultural and mediation schedule had to and was able to address these questions related to exile. As we must open our doors to those that act, we welcomed the associations Toulouse 20 juin and Amnesty International throughout the duration of the exhibition. They were given the museum hall as a space to exchange and discuss the situation of migrants nowadays with visitors. The exhibition ¡Dulces Sueños! Artists from the contemporary Spanish scene rounded out this proposal with artists that, beyond Spanish history, question the resurgence of postcolonial history and the challenges of world history, that which made us choose or continues to make us choose to exploit others economically, culturally, sexually or politically 16Carlos Aires, Daniel García Andújar, Jordi Colomer, Democracia, Esther Ferrer, Glenda León, Daniela Ortiz, Pedro G. Romero, Oriol Vilanova..
As a polysemic whole with several beginnings, forms and formats, this proposal found an international, national and local audience; a varied audience composed of descendants searching for a piece of the past and art and history enthusiasts, in addition to a significant young audience in search of both knowledge and current issues. It also changed those of us that work at the museum as it made us hear buried voices, voices that are near and far as well as present-day voices, sparking reactions and gradually creating beautiful, moving and unplanned encounters; because it also made us the guardians of a story to be continued and, once more, engaged us not with an exhibition but with moments. It was yet another step in this path of research that we have undertaken. In a few months, we will hear another singular voice that originated from exile, alongside the voices of other unintended creators. Les Abattoirs, Museum – Frac Occitanie Toulouse will soon present the exhibition “La Déconniatrie”: art, exile and psychiatry around François Tosquelles 17La Déconniatrie: art, exil et psychiatrie autour de François Tosquelles, exhibition at Les Abattoirs opening on 14 October 2021, in conjunction with Centre Cultural Contemporània de Barcelona; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Curated by: Carles Guerra, Joana Maso, Julien Michel, Annabelle Ténèze., which will be based on the career of the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912-1994) and his role in the development of the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère, including his artistic and intellectual heritage, which is still strong today. Taking the figure of François Tosquelles (the common theme of the exhibition) as a starting point, it questions the connections between art, exile and psychiatry as well as the notion of creation in a context of exclusion, imprisonment or hospitalisation by uniting a local history of modern art with a history of outsider art and contemporary art, and also with a history of psychology and ethnopsychology and of decoloniality. François Tosquelles arrived in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole on 6 January 1940 after leaving his homeland a few months previously fleeing from the regime of Franco, the winner of the Spanish Civil War. He followed in the footsteps of the exiles of La Retirada and was detained in the Septfonds camp, where he set up a makeshift psychiatric service before returning to Saint-Alban, where he helped make the hospital the birthplace of a new movement in French psychiatry. Before treating the patients, the institution, sick due to its excessively repressive nature, must be treated. Several patients at Saint-Alban started to create—including Auguste Forestier, Benjamin Arneval, Aimable Jayet, Clément Fraisse and Marguerite Sirvins—and became some of the great names associated with what Jean Dubuffet, who passed through Saint-Alban in 1945 and then again 1948, called “outsider art”. The hospital where Tosquelles was located during the Second World War was also the refuge of several members of the Resistance and refugees fleeing the advance of Nazi occupation, including among surrealist circles. Saint-Alban is therefore an incubator, the meeting point of writers, artists and doctors (including the psychiatrist and thinker Frantz Fanon, who had just written Black Skin, White Masks upon his arrival in 1952) who worked together on a new experience of exile in its various forms and are the catalyst of art-therapy, art that heals: “act in one’s local area, think of the entire world”, but also heal in one’s local area and heal one’s local area thanks to art, in order to think more globally. It is now down to the museum and art to continue making voices heard—all voices in all languages, even the silent ones—and to ensure that sounds, music and poetry take hold of all spaces, not just the exhibition space.
