A proposition by Ludovic Sauvage.
Grichka Commaret, Claire Decet, Paul Desmazières, Kim Farkas, Samuel François, Hélène Garcia, Christophe Herreros, Irma Name, Yannis Pérez, Prioux & Peixoto, Clara Stengel, Palette Terre and Manuel Vieillot.

A Bureaucratic Desire For Revenge * is a project composed of a set of artistic proposals activated on the HEC Paris campus between May and June 2018. This publication, as well as the website abdfr.com, constitutes both the extension and the archive.

Lionel Catelan took the photographs and Atelier trois produced the graphic design. It was made possible thanks to the active support of the Espace d’art contemporain HEC.

The project is based on a precise protocol involving rapid interventions within the school. The aim of the device is to question, in a visual way, both the immediate context and the scope of the gestures made in the different spaces offered by the campus environment. The invited artists are free to juxtapose their practices to the spatial or administrative constraints suggested by an office, a hall of honour, a gymnasium, a refectory or an amphitheatre.

Derived from an unusual situation – intervening within a business school with specific symbolism and aesthetics – one of the challenges of the project is to bring out a vocabulary of forms.

Depending on the interventions, some describe the school and its infrastructures, while others show us the choices of individuals confronted with the desired, yet relative neutrality of the campus spaces. More than the description of an experience, the images are full of observations or clues that this archive provides for interpretation.

Each production was archived in two stages according to the same protocol: a shot of the intervention in its context and a complementary document scanned by the artists and provided a posteriori. Written by their authors in a condensed time frame, the documented gestures offer a variety of actions and forms (sculptural, pictorial, filmic or performative) that the images sketch out.

An aesthetics is then instantly materialized that encompasses this distance between lightness of action and administrative heaviness, which the excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s text, erected as an editorial of this project, tends to describe with great humour. And seriously.

* The phrase is borrowed from Dylan Carlson’s group, Earth. A Bureaucratic Desire For Revenge is a two-part track from their debut album Extra-Capsular Extraction (1991).