UNI.E.S PAR LE FEU
WITH ANES HOGGAS, SAMET JONUZI, SUELA JONUZI, KLEVIS MORINA & ERSI MORINA
MAGASINS GÉNÉRAUX, PANTIN, FRANCE

APRIL 2 — MAY 8, 2022

After musician Thylacine in 2019 and artist and researcher Jeanne Vicerial in autumn 2021, Magasins Généraux has invited artist and activist Mégane Brauer to take possession of the entire site and its programming as part of an exhibition-residency.

For this first large-scale project in a cultural venue, Mégane Brauer chose to open up a new dimension in her work and extend her invitation to five young teenage exiles, with whom she forms an artistic collective and shares a common story around fire. The result is a vast, immersive and poetic environment made up of dozens of cypress trees that seem to burst into flames, and glittering coal. Designed to match the building and its architecture, which itself appears to be ablaze, it is the setting for texts, echoing objects, sound works and an invitation to take part in the project.

This artistic collaboration with several authors is also an opportunity to question copyright in the particular case of people living in exile. The residency is thus approached by transforming the Magasins Généraux for five weeks, not so much into a production workshop, but into a laboratory for artistic, social and legal research. Through encounters, workshops, performances and the pooling of knowledge, “Uni-e-s par le feu” seeks to address more generally and collectively the living conditions of people in situations of exile and precariousness, as well as the role of artistic creation and its social utility in today’s world.

« When I was a child, I witnessed a fire in a cypress hedge surrounding a Sonacotra shelter that encircled the perpetrators themselves and was immediately extinguished. A fire started out of anger and impotence, then nothing and no one to talk about it. The fire at St Just marked the brutal end of a place where many people had tried to launch collective struggles. The exhibition is not a literal translation, but rather what I have retained through a sort of trace of the links that make up this event.

How to create a dissonance between the precarity suffered by our bodies, our living spaces, our objects and our minds. These multiple and plural forms of precarity are at the heart of my work. I don’t pretend to want to change things, and I’m fairly deterministic, but what do we do with this shared history we’ve been subjected to, what’s left of it, and what can we make differently? For me, it’s through art, but there are many other possible forms.

(...) The challenge is to be able, as artists, to create our own decent working conditions, enabling us to remain the custodians of our work. And in the context of the exhibition at the Magasins Généraux, this comes into play through copyright, and it turns out that some of the protagonists I’ve invited are of foreign origin, even though I consider that as a French person, I’m an integral part of this collective.»

— Mégane Brauer