La Saison du T-shirt, Marseille
Estel Fonseca, Basile Ghosn, Katia Kameli, Katharina Schmidt, Ursula Döbereiner, Yoan Sorin, Camille Soualem, et Loreto Martínez Troncoso
TWALI Belsunce
Based on a proposal by Cédric Aurelle
La Saison du T-shirt is an invitation to several artists to consider the T-shirt as an exhibition space, and to conceive the forms of its circulation from a relational space based on conviviality, the neighborhood café, considered a priori to be remote from traditional art circuits, whether commercial, institutional or alternative.
From the Printemps de l’Art Contemporain (weekend of May 4) to the Art-o-rama fair (end of August) to the last day of summer, seven events are on offer to friends, passing guests, neighbors and other TWALI regulars, as well as to enthusiasts, the curious and the curious at heart. These include screen-printing workshops, installations, performances, barbecues, concerts, dj sets and films, all of which are ways of moving beyond the exhibition to forms of exchange.
If the T-shirt can be understood as a metaphor for the city of Marseille, torn between the hedonism of the sun and the rough vocabulary of the street, La Saison du T-shirt is first and foremost a reflection on the material conditions of artists’ existence and production in the field of art in general, and in Marseille in particular. In this context, characterized by a shortage of both space and resources, the café, which makes hospitality the principle of the relationship, presents itself as a place for the production of social forms, open to artists, and responding to the need to invent other ways of being together and conversing, of which the T-shirt can be the support and catalyst.
The project was born out of meetings between neighbors of the Belsunce district, Marseille’s historic working-class heart, Ahmed and Karim Boussalem, founders of TWALI, and Cédric Aurelle, curator and critic, with the aim of bringing together projects conceived in the specificity of a given context, the history of a district, its sociological reality, its contrasts and its transformations.
The invited artists live or have lived in Marseille, some of them in Belsunce, and work locally as well as in France and abroad. The T-shirts are produced in Marseille from organic cotton, in an eco-responsible factory, and will be on sale on site for 40 euros. Each artist will produce 30 copies, using one or more techniques to suit his or her artistic practice (transfer, sewing, silkscreen, etc.).
With Yoan Sorin, Estel Fonseca, Katia Kameli, Katharina Schmidt and Ursula Döbereiner, Camille Soualem, Basile Ghosn and Loreto Martínez Troncoso
