Art Showroom: Juliette George, Laureate of Région Sud Art Prize 2025
Juliette George
“There is a possibility of a literature that is beyond print and paper, and probably this is where I hope to be.”
– Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, TH 2058
“Where it smells of shit, it smells of being.”
– Antonin Artaud, In Search of Fecality (1948)
“Disaster, failure, flop, dud or bust, stumble, abort, crash, collapse, fall apart, break down, misfire, fall flat. – Informal: draw a blank, bomb, flop, fizzle out, miss, fail, sink. – Colloquial: go to shit, fuck up, go tits up.”
– Dictionary of Synonyms
Fiasco, flunk, flop, failure… With Feria & Foria, Juliette George invites us to follow her on a literary drift through the winding paths of failure. A subject sparked by a string of word associations and a few coincidences that Raymond Hains and his “Macintoshages” would likely have welcomed with a wink. Ever alert and attuned to signs, Juliette George began methodically mining her immediate experience as a young artist, invited for the first time to show her work at an art “fair” (feria), navigating from one rocky metaphor to another, towards the fear of “fucking up” (foria)—and eventually grounding herself—Eureka!—on the vast, uncharted territory of failure.
From foire (fair)—a periodic commercial event—to foirer (failure)—the negative outcome of an attempt—via to foirer (fuck up)—to have diarrhea; to malfunction, to fail disastrously—the writing was on the wall: her “showroom” would be a mess.
From then on, with the enthusiasm of someone who has good news to share, Juliette George embarked on her quest, asking members of an informal, like-minded network to recommend a book that, in their view, addresses the theme of failure. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Moby-Dick, Breviary of the Defeated, The Abyss, The Meteors… A first handful of titles emerged, each one a valuable marker on this uncertain map, forming the foundation of a rigorous, minimal in situ installation.
Three floor levels—echoing the three tiers of a winner’s podium—run across the full width of the four-by-four-meter booth assigned to her by Art-o-rama. Covered in brown carpet, they form a kind of platform. A bibliography, handwritten in pencil by the artist herself on a single blue-tinted A4 sheet, is pinned to the wall. More or less aligned below, a pile of books rests on the carpet. In one corner, the undefined presence of a back scratcher evokes the possibility of a literary form “beyond ink and paper, ” inviting the skeptical visitor to take a seat on this vessel and reflect not only on their own failures, but also on the far more alarming collective ones steering our world toward catastrophe—for avoir la foire (having the runs)
also means being afraid.
Yasmine d’O. Berlin, August 2025
