Comme une journée en salon de coiffure
2019

French Hair is a double sided project. The first side is a event taking place at a corner hairdresser in Marseille on the 31st of August. The second side is a web platform presenting the works of the participating artists along with documents and media related to the event. French Hair is an art show which aims to explore open narratives and collective experience in a singular social context.

[Photography by @lenancker]

Alain
So about the project, the first question I wanted to ask, is what’s your feeling about it ? Or less straight forward, how do you represent the form of this project ? In our group (romancero gitano) we had long discussions of what makes an art show. What are the conditions of its existence or non-existence. What is the part of the statement, what is the force field which connects historicity and narrative. I think especially working on forms that lies in between digital, deterritorialized and physical raise a lot of questions of that kind…

Rebecca
This project is fascinating (and timely) on many levels. It’s about a community (of people, objects, ideas), but it’s also about a solo experience; there’s an aspect of the mundanity of life-admin coupled with the involuntary participation of viewing and wearing an art object; it’s about the intersection of vanity and ego, with conversation and relaxation as contradictory outlets; it’s about the nuance of historical and modern day ‘salons’ – the 18th century social gatherings in which individuals engaged in the art of conversation in pursuit of knowledge and fellowship, mixed with the modern day functionality of getting a haircut, but also the forming of friendships, participatory democracy and the revival of social debate.

On AOS, French Hair occupies many spaces – the platform is used as a promotional tool for the event, as an archival tool for photography and video, as a starter for conversations, and as a gallery for showing the work of the artists involved. In this way, the project becomes a conglomeration of many ‘hats’, formed of a research group, a commodity, a tête-à-tête, an exchange (monetary, verbally, experientially) but it also aligns with a relational aesthetics mode of production whereby the human relations and social context are the point of departure.

There is a performative context afforded to the project too, whereby the act of putting on a robe changes the way you are received in a space like a hair salon – it’s unavoidable. The objects themselves also play a performative role in that the works printed on them (which perhaps were once kinetic of some sort) are now still, screen- grabbed or rendered immobile via the transportation of them from the digital into the real. What does it mean to bring a digitised object into a physical space?

Alain
Well I think one of the first time the idea of the project in its current form came up, was unsurprisingly at a corner hairdressing salon in Lyon. Amongst the fake LV’s and Gucci’s, stood a robe quite more interesting than the others. The robe was digitally printed with photographs of haircuts so you could literally choose on your robe, the cut you wanted to have ! Beyond the «fun fact», this was a good starting point to think about the question of the screen. Of course, a screen is trivially this variable sized electronic device we are quite familiar with, but it is also any surface designed to channel one attention, most of the time for mercantile purposes. So it doesn’t need to be lit, nor it needs to be interactive, it just have to be the surface of an image dedicated to catch and hold human attention. In that sense our invitation to the artists to take over those hairdressing robes with digital printing was a disguised proposal of screening. And I think they understood that quite well and their works resonated perfectly with the format. So I’m not sure something was moved from the digital to the real or to a physical space, I think we just experimented a peculiar type of screening, with fabric instead of LEDs or liquid cristals. Yet the context of the event, an afternoon in a hairdressing salon, also sets up the rules of play. And even if one could see Fench Hair as an “undercover” art show of some sort (une exposition livrée en sous-main), I think the rules of play here, as you mentioned, were more the ones of an everyday-life social event or situation. So the salon Athena Coiffure really played the role of a host, and we, even if we initiated the thing, really felt as guests. So in that sense, it would have been quite a clumsiness to intend to transform the salon to a temporary art gallery. As in a host-guest relationship, what came more naturally was an experience of a being-with and a being-within.

Another question we were confronted with, was the question of documentation. We had to find a way to share the project and the works of the artists beyond the temporary existence of the event. With that in mind frenchair.shop was created as a documentation platform as much as an autonomous online version of the project, with the graphical parti-pris of taking over the aesthetics of e-commerce websites. So the question of the screen also finds an echo here, on a more semiotical aspect.

Those formal questions, came along with a theoretical concern which regards the place of the narrative (le récit) in a documentation process. We were quite conscious that there is always a story being told along with an art show or an event of that kind. Modernity could be characterised by the profusion of hegemonic figures as the central characters of those stories. So we preferred to keep distance from anything which would resemble to a big story and get closer to a more anecdotic and common one.