Faire avec

The Crac Occitanie presents a major exhibition by Eric Baudelaire, assembling a collection of existing projects and new works distributed throughout all of the art centre’s spaces. The exhibition offers a broad overview of the artist’s research into the notion of resistance and the relationship between art and event, tackling topical political subjects, which he explores with genuine visual poetry.

Artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire has spent over fifteen years developing an experimental practice on the fringes of the documentary form, examining the construction and staging of images, the interpenetration between fiction and reality, as well as the intimate and complex relationship that an author maintains with a subject. This relationship is the axis around which the exhibition was conceived. In a recent text, writer Philippe Mangeot evoked Eric Baudelaire’s relationship with the question of authorship, “to the crisis of which he joyfully contributes: almost all of his work shows that process which ends with the subject of the work becoming a party to its creation”. Entitled Faire avec [Making Do], the exhibition unfolds this principle, bringing together projects in which Eric Baudelaire converses with rather than on, enlisting other singular subjects to take part in developing works.

Faire avec also means inviting researchers, curators, activists and artists into and around the work, to probe it, extend it or even contradict it, opening new base lines where different languages can coexist.The exhibition title should also be understood as a method, an attitude towards the emergencies and upheavals of today’s world. Faire avec means coming to terms with a reality that is slipping away, serial economic and political crises, the collapse of certainties, and the difficulty of finding spaces for what is shared, and doing this using the tools of art, of collective creation and the joy it brings.