Open to the invention of hybrid, interdisciplinary forms, the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection entrusts organizers with a series of events entitled At Large. This spring, the duo of curators and writers Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou will share their project “Paris Orbital” with the public in the auditorium. The project is inspired by the mythologies underpinning the idealized image of Paris—gluttony, sex, luxury, and revolution—a city that has nurtured an ad nauseam obsession with its own reflection: “to the point of transforming the mineral into pasteboard, the sovereign into the picturesque and its most minor elevations into a posture.”
Through a series of evening events, “Paris Orbital” paints a portrait of the capital in the form of a theme park in which each myth is embodied by an attraction. Each attraction will become a theatre of pulp operations where Irma Vep and François Villon, Ledoux and the Grand Guignol, Nicole Kidman and Auguste Gusteau rub shoulders under a pile of showcases and neon lights. On Thursday 3 March, the introductory talk of the “Paris Orbital” cycle will provide a tour of this mythical theme park.
“The beauty of a city is proportional to its horror. Victor Hugo thus located the conscience of Paris not in its highest monuments but in that place without secrets that are the sewers. This is why Paris, a veritable Luna Park of the nineteenth century in which the fantasies of modernity coagulated, transformed violence into a spectacle, morbidity into a leisure activity, and adrenaline into a cardinal virtue. The imminent death machine designed for the Eiffel Tower, the asylum dedicated to phallic pleasure on the Montmartre hill, or the Grand Guignol theatre dedicated to the staging of gore were, for better or for worse, the spectacles that made Paris the capital of fin-de-siècle entertainment.”
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos et Charles Teyssou
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou live and work in Paris.
Their current and upcoming projects include the exhibition Clowns Kingdom at the Maison du Danemark (Paris); a publication on homosexual cruising with HEAD (Geneva); and the Arles Terminal City archive, Fondation LUMA (Arles). They recently curated Anathemata at Mostyn (Llandudno, Wales) with works by Antonin Artaud, Pierre Guyotat, and Sarah Kane; Darja Bajagić’s GOREGEOUS at the Confort Moderne (Poitiers), and co-curated an exhibition with Kevin Blinderman on the figure of the dandy Jacques de Bascher at Treize (Paris) and the Kunsthalle in Bern. Together with Dustin Cauchi and Dasha Zaharova, they launched The Opioid Crisis Lookbook platform in 2020: a publishing and exhibition project infused with narcotic culture. Together with Rasmus Myrup and Octave Perrault, they initiated Cruising Pavilion, a series of exhibitions dedicated to the links between sexual dissidence, art, and architecture.
