with Martine Aballéa, Athi Patra Ruga, Pauline Bastard, Cindy Bernard, Bernard Johannes Blume, Christian Boltanski, Henry Bond et Liam Gillick, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Robert Cumming, Roe Ethridge, Robert Frank, Luigi Ghirri, Rodney Graham, Peter A. Hutchinson, Valérie Jouve, André Kertész, Kapwani Kiwanga, Frédéric Lefever, Rainier Lericolais, Richard Long, Michel François, Laurent Montaron, Jean-Luc Moulène, Denis Oppenheim, Paul Pouvreau, Evariste Richer, Thomas Ruff, Bruno Serralongue, Cindy Sherman, Link O. Winston, Manuel Ismora.

Aurélien Mole, following on from the first part of this dive into the photographic collections of the three Fracs of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, what thread are you drawing at the MÉCA?

AM: For each exhibition, we choose to work with an artist who has a rather special relationship with photography. For the MÉCA, it's with Éric Tabuchi, whose work revolves around landscape typologies. He demonstrates great finesse in the visual organization of reality. Drawing on this quality, together we composed “Un Être, un Acte, un Objet, un Lieu” (A Being, an Act, an Object, a Place), which presents, on every wall at our disposal, exactly what the title indicates !

Éric Tabuchi, what interested you in the three Frac collections ? How did you approach this collaboration with Aurélien Mole ?

ET: First and foremost, I was interested in exploring these three collections in terms of their specific features, to see how each one differed from the other two, what their historical stratifications were, and what choices had governed their constitution. In short, if I relate this exploration to my practice of the territory, what was the urbanism that characterized this ensemble? When Aurélien Mole gave the project its final shape, I thought it was important to represent its diversity. I wanted to ensure that every era, every major trend, every format and technique was represented as much as possible.

How did you go about designing the exhibition?

AM : We had to think of groups of four artists who could hold together in a semantic, conceptual or generational mode... It was the capacity of each group to produce a meta-image, i.e. to form a figure that reflects what the images brought together have in common, that guided our choice.

ET: The architecture of the space and the layout of the picture rails, which form an asymmetrical cross on the plateau of the MÉCA, mean that the visitor is not inside the hanging system but, on the contrary, outside it. Not that they're excluded, but at least they have to mentally reconstitute the unfolded structure in order to perceive its totality. Given this peculiarity, which in fact precludes apprehension from a fixed point, it was important to think of each face as an autonomous object telling its own story.