Thomas Conchou ~ JOUVENCX

JOUVENCX by Lou Masduraud

a solo project for NUIT BLANCHE 2020
from Oct. 3rd to Dec. 12th, 2020
at Maison Populaire, Montreuil (FR)

Lou Masduraud is interested in the spaces and practices of collective life, as well as the systems that make them possible. In her installations, made contextually and in situ, she works on formal and informal networks of human activities. The more or less visible machinery (electrical networks, public lights, sewers, underground tunnels) that are constantly pumping and evacuating the currents necessary for city life represent all kinds of formal inspirations for her. Street lamps, air vents, or letterboxes thus become skylights towards the interior fabric of the city, allowing glimpses of the inverted sites that reside within the structures and architectures that we depend on to live.

In these interstitial places, phantasmagorical spaces open up, exaggerated mirrors of reality, within a critical and feminist perspective. Whether it be the emotional economies at work in hierarchical labour and channels, the politics of self-organisation and intellectual emancipation, or our relationship to ecology and ecosystems, her artworks are objects for exploring our relationships to one another and to our environments.

Launched in 2018, the evolutive project Active Substances presents its fifth iteration here and is deployed for the first time out of doors. These installations borrow their forms from urban hydraulic technologies such as public fountains, lavoirs, or public houses. Here, they host natural and medicinal concoctions of hypericum, everlasting flower, and wild basil (with anxiolytic, analgesic, and aphrodisiac properties) to ward off the miasma of the year 2020. Comprising a public fountain and two enamel-coated ceramic urinals, JOUVENCX presents a collective treatment for the public to inhale.

Lou Masduraud (born in 1990, lives and works in Lyon and Geneva) will present her first monographic exhibition in France at the Maison populaire, in 2021.

photo credits: Simon·e Thiébaut
graphic design: Roxanne Maillet

This project is made possible thanks to the curatorial residency of Maison populaire, with the support of Ministère de la Culture - DRAC Île-de-France, Conseil régional d’Île-de-France, Conseil départemental de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Ville de Montreuil, and Métropole du Grand Paris..