While many contemporary practices turn to fiction — even science fiction — as a speculative tool for imagining the future, the artists in the group exhibition The Practice of Everyday Life take a contrary approach. They draw from what is right in front of us, nestled in the folds and creases of our daily lives.
The urgent need to respond to ecological, economic, and institutional crises — which in recent years have reached a kind of breaking point — has led many artists to imagine alternatives to prevailing systems of life and labor: systems that are often exhausting, extractive, and unsustainable. These systems risk becoming normalized, yet they continue to erode our collective imagination.
The artists gathered in this exhibition look to the margins and interstices of the everyday to invent new ways of being in the world. They focus on ordinary objects and tools, which they appropriate and transform; on fragile and unstable materials; on precarious situations, shifting spaces, and undervalued forms of labor. They make tangible the multiple, unstable, and intertwined worlds that people, often quietly, continue to build together.
Collecting, recycling, repurposing, transforming, collaborating, repairing, borrowing, hacking, investigating — these are some of the working methodologies that shape and nourish their practices. Driven by both a desire for autonomy and a clear-eyed pragmatism, the invited artists devise combinatory “ways of doing” that allow them to reclaim the goods, tools, and spaces imposed upon them. Across a wide variety of formal approaches, the act of transformation — of materials, tools, and uses — stands at the heart of their work.
Borrowing its title from the seminal book by the unclassifiable figure Michel de Certeau — at once priest, philosopher, and historian — The Practice of Everyday Life is conceived, curated, and produced in close relationship with its immediate context: the city of Bordeaux. The exhibition positions both the Capc and the broader urban and cultural fabric as a terrain for experimentation, creating shared objects with the public and repurposing materials generated by the city itself.
This exhibition gives voice to artists who are researchers of singular, inventive, discreet, and sovereign forms of joy — creating, in the words of American writer bell hooks, “a space of encouragement.”
Artists: Wilfrid Almendra, Francis Alÿs, Bibliomania (Alex Balgiu & Olivier Lebrun), Andrea Bowers, Pia Camil, Jennifer Caubet, Ruth Ewan, Cao Fei, Gina Folly, Birke Gorm, Shilpa Gupta, Ane Hjort Guttu & Sveinung Unneland, Oliver Hardt, Adelita Husni-Bey, Judith Kakon, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Klara Lidén, Maider López, Enzo Mari, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yuko Mohri, Moffat Takadiwa, Daniel Otero Torres, Anri Sala, Marinella Senatore, Ettore Sottsass, Tenant of Culture, Naama Tsabar.
