A HOUSE OF STONE
IN A METROPOLIS
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHT
INHABITED BY THOSE WHO INVITE OTHERS
Ben Kinmont, This isn’t it Noisy-le-Sec, 2017
Various materials - Archives - Flyer - Balloons
Since the early 1990s, Ben Kinmont has been carrying out projects that work through different contexts and systems of public, private, domestic and artistic values. They often involve principles of hospitality offered to strangers. His contribution to the exhibition at La Galerie was entitled This isn’t it Noisy-le-Sec, 2017. Carried out with 7th-grade pupils from the Jacques Prévert junior secondary school in Noisy-le-Sec, the project consisted in having each pupil encounter people from their circle of friends and acquaintances, or others met by chance in the street, and engage in a conversation about what is or is not a work of art. The pupils then asked their interlocutors to blow up a balloon while thinking of something that is not a work of art, after which the pupil deposited the balloon in a room at La Galerie. Over the course of the exhibition the balloons deflated, releasing into the art centre those exhaled thoughts about what is not art. This project was created in collaboration with the artist Céline Drouin Laroche and the teachers Karine Lefort Baievitch, Floriane Havard and Abdel Eddamiri. Together with the pupils, they developed a publication on the project entitled Student Series: This isn’t it Noisy-le-Sec which belongs to the Student Series developed by Ben Kinmont and published by Antinomian Press.