Les vies qu’on mène

An exhibition by the Mobile Lives Forum

With the sixteen photographers of the Tendance Floue collective and a photographer from Magnum Photos

CITÉ INTERNATIONALE DES ARTS, Paris, 4th arrondissement

March 1 – May 19, 2022

Free admission

The pandemic that has now lasted for nearly two years has greatly disrupted our movements (frequency of trips, means of transport, destination) and how we organize them (finding new rhythms, avoiding crowds, etc.). We are now fully aware of the central place that mobility holds in our lives (whether for work, health, social life, etc.), in our territories and in our economies. Before this, there was another mobility crisis, this time on a national scale: the Yellow Vests movement, which began with protests against the fuel price policy, deemed too high for cars and too low for planes.

Our mobility is therefore at the heart of the latest contemporary crises: social, economic but also environmental. However, the impact on French people differs greatly according to their profession, their living environment, their age, their social network, etc. This goes beyond the simplistic dichotomies that are often cited: center vs periphery, rich vs poor, men vs women, individual vs collective transport...

Bertrand Meunier / Tendance Floue for the Mobile Lives Forum

In this context, the Mobile Lives Forum - a think tank on mobility and its future - launched a national photographic project (inspired by the 1984 DATAR project on landscapes) to document this unseen diversity in the lifestyles of French people relating to their mobility. The Forum enlisted sixteen photographers from the Tendance Floue collective, as well as one photographer from the Magnum Photos agency, to travel throughout France and offer their vision (whether astonished, empathetic, distant ...) of the daily lives of its inhabitants. Using both digital and film, taking black and white and color photographs, they produced a wide variety of formats: large scale, video, mosaics, archives, etc. Depending on their career, artistic project and personal tastes, each photographer chose to capture the trace of one particular lifestyle while journeying across France, to contribute to the overall portrait of contemporary national lifestyles. While their work was informed by the Mobile Lives Forum’s views on mobility - the result of a decade of research in the humanities and social sciences (geography, sociology, economics, etc.) - each photographer had carte blanche to explore it on their own terms, following their own sensitivities, interests and methods.

The exhibition Les vies qu'on mène at the Cité internationale des arts will showcase over 400 photographs, offering a sensitive insight into the daily lives of our country’s youth, families, elderly, poor people, urban dwellers, isolated individuals, rich people and rural communities, in summer and in winter, day and night, before and during the health crisis. The photographs allow visitors to immerse themselves in extremely varied lifestyles, all the while giving them the opportunity to reflect on their own daily lives. They raise many questions about rhythm, pugnacity, control, pleasure, abandonment, conquest, and daily compositions.

The events of spring 2020 impacted and informed the relevance of this photography project, conceived between the Yellow Vests movement and the explosion of the current pandemic, proving - if it were necessary - the social reality of mobility in French people’s lives.

With this artistic and political project, the Mobile Lives Forum reminds us, in the runup to the Presidential elections, how important mobility is as a societal issue, one that cannot be approached in a simplistic or uniform way. It shows the need to design public policies that take into account diverse lifestyles, so as to prevent them from being ineffective or even unacceptable for their repercussions on work, consumption and free time. By raising public awareness and informing decision-makers on this crucial matter, the Mobile Lives Forum hopes to encourage a transition towards more desired and sustainable mobilities.

Yohanne Lamoulere / Tendance Floue for the Mobile Lives Forum

Practical information:

Cité internationale des arts

Marais Site, 18 Rue de l’Hôtel de ville, 75004 Paris

Metro: Line 7, Pont Marie station or Line 1, Saint-Paul station

Free admission

Tuesday to Friday from 2pm to 7pm

Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 7pm

Late night opening, one Thursday a month until 9pm

Tendance Floue

Founded in 1991, Tendance Floue is an award-winning collective of sixteen French photographers, internationally recognized for its achievements at the crossroads of social, cultural, documentary and artistic work. Exploring the world against the grain of its globalized image, peering into the shadows of exposed subjects, capturing unique moments: Tendance Floue is a unique kind of laboratory. For thirty years, a special, undefinable alchemy of ideas and energies allowed them to create a singular photographic language and to innovate in the narrative field. Beyond their individual approaches, the sixteen photographers collectively embark on photographic adventures of a different kind, taking on the character of performances. From a confrontation of pictures, montages and combinations emerges a new, collectively produced material.

www.tendancefloue.net

The Cité internationale des arts

The Cité internationale des arts is an artist residency that brings together creators in the heart of Paris and allows them to pursue a production or research project spanning disciplines.

For periods of two months to a year, the Cité internationale des arts offers an environment that fosters creativity, and is open to meetings with professionals from the cultural sector. The residents recieve tailor-made support from the team at the Cité internationale des arts.

In the Marais or Montmartre areas of Paris, the residency also enables meetings and exchanges with over 300 artists and actors from the art world, of all generations, nationalities and disciplines.

From January 2022, the Cité internationale des arts will take its audience across Europe through meetings, professional exchanges on artistic mobility in Europe – and more particularly in France, with the exhibition Les Vies qu'on mène – portraits of artists, visits, etc.

citedesartsparis.net

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Movement

Movement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.

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Lifestyle

A lifestyle is a composition of daily activities and experiences that give sense and meaning to the life of a person or a group in time and space.

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