SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE PRÉLUDE La rampe PèreMèRe

The CEAAC is partnering with the Aubette 1928 to present a dual exhibition by artist Florian Fouché, marking the first stage in a programme devoted to public health issues. The exhibition builds on Fouché’s ongoing artistic research project entitled Manifeste assisté (Assisted Manifesto), a broad perceptual inquiry initiated in 2020 around what the artist calls ‘assisted life’. Since 2024, he has developed this research into a multi-chapter exhibition series titled SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE PRÉLUDE [1], which offers an oblique exploration of the history and current transformations of public healthcare. Rather than presenting a strictly documentary reading of these themes, Florian Fouché stages the devices, architectures, and imaginaries that concretely organize assistance, accessibility, or the exclusion of bodies in public space.

The fourth chapter of this series, SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE PRÉLUDE La rampe PèreMèRe, brings together installations, sculptures, films, and documents to examine how the institutional forms of care are organized for both bodies and objects in today’s society.

At the CEAAC, the exhibition takes the form of an immersive installation that engages in dialogue with the Art Nouveau architecture of the building, a listed monument, addressing a central issue raised by the artist: the site’s inaccessibility for people with reduced mobility [2]. Here, the artist deploys a reworked version of the visual language of the Aubette 1928 within a phantasmagorical scenario. The Père Cuillère, represented as both miraculous and in a state of gestation, is a central sculptural figure in the exhibition. The character evolves through an environment of inclined coloured planes, ramps, and sculptures deriving from Nicole Parent’s ‘Inclipan’ method of gymnastics and the theory of ‘oblique living’ developed by her brother Claude Parent. In this unstable landscape, somewhere between accessibility device and obstacle, bodies, whether wheeled or upright, appear caught in a paradoxical system of assistance, effort, and constraint.

Nearby, in the spaces of the Aubette 1928, amid the coloured surfaces designed by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, her husband Hans Arp, and Theo van Doesburg—which were subsequently covered over in 1938 and restored for reopening to the public in 2006—the exhibition continues with the first presentation of the 2026 film Mort assistée (Assisted Death). Commissioned and produced by the Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne in Paris in the context of its closure for renovation, the film offers a phantasmagorical vision of a museum under maintenance. Through a series of filmed actions, Florian Fouché explores how cultural institutions organize the preservation, disappearance, or transformation of their artworks. The film is accompanied by sculptures, drawings, and documents related to its production, extending the reflection on forms of ‘assistance’ applied to institutions and artworks.

By linking these two Strasbourg heritage sites, the exhibition creates a tension between architecture, art history, and contemporary policies of public assistance. Between impossible accessibility, bodies in motion, partial reconstructions, and suspended cultural institutions, Florian Fouché proposes a critical and poetic exploration of the visible and invisible infrastructures that organize both assisted life and, sometimes, assisted death.