BARRICADE. (Excuse The Mess. Make Yourself at Home)

This exhibition was developed in collaboration with students from the History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA program, under the supervision of curator Juliette Pollet (CNAP) and Professor Emmanuel Guy.

The curating of decorative arts and design is often limited to the display of commodity-objects, in particular valuable and rare pieces created for elite audiences. While these objects bear witness to an aesthetic excellence which undeniably deserves admiration and study, they also materialize the political and cultural values of the ruling class. They were made to be displayed. They tell history from above.

The art, design and material culture of the oppressed is, by contrast, rather more difficult to research and exhibit. The objects of history’s underclasses have often gone uncollected, unrecorded and unpreserved. Like their creators and users, they have too often been excluded from the making of history. It goes without saying that they do not lend themselves easily to the fetishizing and spectacular format of the exhibition. They resist.

For their collective exhibition, students researched the construction, history and cultural significance of a recurring object in the material culture of social movements: the barricade. The display strategies they have developed seek to address the challenges of exhibiting an object of struggle in a contemporary context.