72 ( projets pour ne plus y penser)

"... But if there is a sense of reality, and nobody will doubt it has a right to exist, there must be something we could call the sense of possible. (...). We could consequently simply define the sense of possible as the ability to think all that could be "as good", and not attribute more importance to what is than to what is not...?"

Robert Musil, The man without qualities

72 (Projects to get it over with) was published by the Presses du Réel (France) and Idea Book (International). This book collects a big number of projects by contemporary French artists.
With "project", we mean the strict definition of the dictionary: "What we intend to do", with this very plastic notion of projection in time and space. Specifically here, the artists were asked to provide preparatory elements (Maps, sketches, drawings, graphs, photographs, texts,...) of a project that was buried at the bottom of their memory or of their drawers. A project they could never achieve, for lack of time, of means, or of opportunity, a project that will then momentarily exist in an editorial way, giving it a potential existence. These projects have the common denominator to be artistic propositions intended for a specific function in life, in the social world, or simply to be conceived as a specific activity. Beyond a review of the imaginary, the intention of this work is to be an inventive viewpoint on contemporary artistic forms: how do artists see the world, how can they interfere with it or infiltrate it (elsewhere than in classical exhibitions)? What is the pertinence of this viewpoint? The intention of this work is finally to show how the contemporary artist increasingly diversifies his fields of activities. To implement a cartography of future works, of concrete propositions, each with its own synopsis.