Street trash

The exhibition brings together works and artists who share the aesthetic universe of gore, grotesque and post-apocalyptic culture, like the film of the same name: Street Trash, by Jim Muro (1987).

Street trash, recycling, waste, abandoned and abandoned places have been an inexhaustible source of ideas for plastic creation for several generations of artists. Dadas, new realists and since the 1980s American artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Paul Thek, Jimmy Durham or John Bock have brought out this violence from urban, underground and peri-urban cultures with humor and brutality.

The exhibition attempts here to identify the horror genre in sculpture and contemporary art.. It aims to bring together, in a dark and disturbing scenography, forty works by contemporary artists who, through their forms, materials, and aesthetics, share this joyful fascination for what is scary, repulsive or traumatic but which, nevertheless, sublimates poor and abandoned materials.

The artists: Sylvie Auvray, Alexandre Bavard, Michel Blazy, Michel Blazy, Mathis Collins, Johan Creten, Mimosa Echard, Daniel Firman, Julien Goniche, Michel Gouéry, Amandine Guruceaga, Amandine Guruceaga, Agata Ingarden, Agata Ingarden, Agata Ingarden, John Isaarden, John Isaacs, John Isaacs, John Isaacs, John Isaacs, John Isaacs, John Isaacs, Renaud Jerez, Jed Kirby, Hugo L'ahelec, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Estrid Lutz, Anita Moljoux, Estrid Lutz, Anita Moloux Inero, Elsa Sahal, Maxime Sanchez, Ugo Schiavi, Jim Shaw, Anne Wenzel.

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Nietzsche was wondering how much truth we were able to bear. We are entitled to ask ourselves this question about the dose, not the truth, but the poisoning. What dose of poison will our body withstand? Up to what degree of surrounding dirt and rot will we be able to adapt so as not to die? We produce two billion tons of waste per year and we live under the illusion that cleanliness is sustainable and that it takes precedence over dirt. We will produce three to four billion in 25 years, if the world still exists in 25 years (and it's not easy). And we experience every episode of dirt or poison as a temporary, temporary episode, a pause between two sequences of cleanliness and purity.We continue to remove waste in landfills far from the center, but these are every day a little less distant because they keep getting bigger. And we live as if these landfills would not grow one day to the point of devouring cities. We live as if dirt will never become the rule, and cleanliness the exception. We continue to move heavier and more dangerous waste away onto trash islands, which end up filling to the brim, slowly but surely turning Earth into a Trash Planet.

Of course, the vast majority of this waste comes from the richest part of the world's population. The one who can afford to produce, consume and throw away a lot of plastic, metal, glass. And while plastic only represents 12% of municipal waste, we know that it has a particularly long lifespan: a plastic bottle takes between 100 and 1000 years to degrade. Microplastic particles contaminate the oceans and poison fish. Soon there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans. When the planet is turned into a trash can, who will be able to survive it? When fish are transformed into plastic, what will be left of us? How much plastic will we be able to handle? The truth is the trash can of life, the non-degradable plastic of the world. And clearly we are not yet ready for this life in the era of the big dump. We are not yet ready to produce the antibodies that would allow us to counter the effects in the short or medium term.

The only film by Jim Muro, “Street Trash” (1987) tells the story of a society of outcasts, ragged sub-proletarians, New York hoards who hang out in the streets and live in a public dump. They make a hell of a life for others as for themselves, when they don't start drinking a drink called Viper, found at the bottom of his reserve by an unscrupulous spirits salesman: a drink that liquefies them and makes their bodies boil. Take “Street Trash” as an exhibition matrix, and trash or dirt as aesthetic subjects,

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