Group exhibition proposed by Anaïs Bloch, Arnaud Cuerel, Roger Gaillard, Elisabeth Jobin and Vicente Lesser, realized within the framework of the Work.Master, HEAD – Geneva.

At once an artists’ group, a gallery, a publishing house, a bookshop and a tea room, the Ecart collective, based in Geneva during the 1970s, has amassed a vast archive around its artistic activities close to Fluxus – from publishing to performance, including exhibitions and mail art. Gathered by the artists, the collection is more a collection of all kinds of elements than an attempt to systematically document the activities of the group and its artist-run-space, so much so that it mixes documents and works without making any distinction.

During a semester, the team of the LabZone Ecart of the HEAD – Geneva went through these archives to bring out parallel histories. Far from wanting to tell the story of the collective Ecart, the proposals of the LabZone Ecart seek on the contrary to emancipate itself from the collection of which it retains only disparate, marginal and subjective elements, to which it is now a question of substituting other voices, of reactivating or even pirating. In place of Ecart’s gestures, the team substitutes its own to give this episode in the history of Geneva art the possibility of reintegrating a present, that of five contemporary practices, within a new artist-run-space.

Text by Elisabeth Jobin