Entretiens sur l'art with Julien Prévieux
Entrusted since 2021 to critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the ‘Entretiens sur l'art’ (Interviews about Art) series, which for over 20 years has built up a formidable collection of artists' words, will from now on be looking closely at the materiality and conditions of emergence of the works of the guest artists.
On the program: a conversation between artist Julien Prévieux and critic Jill Gasparina, followed by the launch of Codex Spatium, the artist's book to be published by Éditions de l'Observatoire de l'Espace du Cnes in March 2025.
Since the late 1990s, Julien Prévieux has developed his artistic work in dialogue with the technical operations typical of highly computerized and rationalized societies: organizing knowledge, prioritizing information, analyzing behavior, calculating flows, managing stocks, generating data, patenting gestures, capturing movements, managing workers. These automated processes are the subject of investigations that can take different forms, from spying on Google's Los Angeles offices with a telephoto lens (Today is Great, 2014), to immersion in the field (Atelier de dessin - B.A.C. du 14e arrondissement de Paris, 2011-2015), data collection (Portraits-vitesses, 2015, Anthologie des regards, 2015-2018) or research in the company of space law experts (Codex Spatium, 2024). Nourished by “a taste for collecting and archiving, collaborating and sharing skills, a formidable combination of humor and rigorous investigation, a policy of counter-use” (Raphaël Brunel), the artist's works are a low-tech transposition of these investigations, in which processes are no longer visible, and bodies return to the foreground.
From the beginnings of his work in 1998, a series of videos documenting physical actions of a burlesque nature (such as gnawing on a tree trunk, or rolling in the streets of Grenoble), to his recent projects that juxtapose dance and the performing arts, Julien Prévieux has explored multiple forms of performative practice. Julien Prévieux has explored multiple forms of performative practice. Against the extreme sophistication of dehumanized control techniques, the artist's work opposes ways of thinking about technique that re-enact the struggle of bodies against (or with) machines.
About the book:
The Codex Spatium project, conceived by artist Julien Prévieux as part of a creative program at the Cnes Space Observatory, is at once a game, a stage performance and a creative film posing the question of a transformation of space law, to better take into account contemporary developments in space activities around the world. In particular, this book unfolds the film, which retraces one of the parties led by artists and actors from the world of space, and their search for a consensus to write a new space treaty. An interview and an analytical text shed light on Julien Prévieux's creative process, and put this project into perspective within his own practice.
