Exhibition of 2024 art & design graduates Beaux-Arts de Marseille – INSEAMM
Opening and performances August 30, 5:00 pm
August 30 – October 13, 2024
Friche la Belle de Mai
41 rue Jobin, Marseille 3e
Open Wednesday to Sunday afternoons

At dawn and dusk, in its microclimate and bioregion that distinguish it from the city center, the Beaux-Arts de Marseille campus in Luminy, at the gateway to the Parc National des Calanques, offers dazzling scenery. It also exudes a gentle, latent anxiety. Without ever letting us know what exactly lies behind it, like the beginning of a thriller that could just as easily become a coming-of-age as a Hitchcock. Perhaps it’s the orange shadow of boars or foxes that criss-cross this territory populated by student-exs and teacher-exs by day, real and fantastical creatures by night. Its architectural qualities allow for multiple, sometimes winding wanderings between its buildings and patios – each journey becoming an adventure in itself. It is from this location that Campus Panic proposes to approach the practices of artists and designers who have graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Marseille.

The term campus panic refers specifically to the centrality (1) of the notion of campus in the reading of certain geopolitical events, from anti-Vietnam war demonstrations on American campuses to the mobilizations that opposed – and continue to do so – the war against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (2). The campus thus becomes a fantasy and a myth, with no specific geographical delimitation. Borrowing from this expression the centrality of a campus that is not a place, but a paradigm, both fantasized and producer of codes, practices and relationships, the exhibition brings together 51 artists and designers whose work is both singular and echoes the tumults that punctuate the present. If at Luminy, anxiety is often gentle, it’s in the face of the turmoil of the world around them that artists produce and some commit themselves. Rather than being a place of seclusion or retreat, the campus is a condensation of the world, allowing us to start from a specific territory – with works that mobilize the landscape and its representation – to traverse the latent anxiety of a contemporary shaken by crises and anxieties, to works that mobilize the archive to respond to vertigo, hijack symbols and myths, invest rituals and mystical imaginations, and finally settle into a kind of tenderness, confronting trauma and assignment with gestures more directly turned towards society. So that panic changes sides.

(1) On this subject, see the enlightening analysis by Samuel Catlin, a researcher in Jewish studies at the University of Buffalo, who shows that this notion of campus, never delimited either in its geographical or academic contours, homogenizes a multitude of actors in a mass sent back to its woke and elitist progressivism (in “The Campus Does Not Exist”, Parapraxis 4, summer 2024. Link: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist – accessed 10/06/2024).
(2) In the same article, Samuel Catlin also shows that the media’s disproportionate interest in what’s happening on campus puts what student-exs and activists are mobilizing for in the background.

Salma Mochtari, curator of the exhibition