[Text im Kunstmagazin artpress Nr. 536 (Okt. 2025) veröffentlicht, S. 77.]
From July 12 to October 11, ARTETXE presents a project by Boris Achour entitled LANGOREYE (The Work of Art in the Age of Oral Transmission) (A Proximity Exhibition), with Åbäke, Boris Achour, Carla Adra, Jean-Max Colard, Jagna Ciuchta, Romain Gandolphe, Dora Garcia, Mark Geffriaud, David Horvitz, l’huipier (Maxime Andres, Aloïs Chalopin, Emma Fleury-Cancouët, Louise Guégan), Florence Jung, Édouard Levé, Liv Schulman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Inaugurated a year ago, this artist-run space has taken up residence in a former 600 m² agricultural cooperative in Tardets-Sorholus, a village of 500 inhabitants located in Soule, in the inland French Basque Country. Emerging from a desire for decentering—geographical, conceptual, cultural, and linguistic—observed in recent years among an increasing number of artists and curators seeking to invest spaces outside urban centers, often in connection with their native regions, this new venue for creation and dissemination aims to move beyond a one-dimensional reading of the relationships between center and periphery.
Invited by ARTETXE, the artist Boris Achour conceived an exhibition of “proximity,” in the same way one might speak of local shops or services that meet our essential needs for food, healthcare, education, and culture. Rather than responding directly to the Basque context or the reality of Soule—marked by a minoritized language and a living oral literature—LANGOREYE initiates, with a touch of humor, a form of general conversation sustained by an uninterrupted practice of speech, whether in the transmission of a work or in its production. Nineteen works by fourteen artists or artist collectives from different generations sketch out a space in which the real and the imaginary interpenetrate through forms and narratives that address both the eye and the tongue equally. Some contributions, moreover, have no material existence other than the narrative through which they attain a form of reality. In order to give them presence for the duration of the exhibition, mediators—stage actresses—welcome visitors several times a week, guiding them (in French or Basque) through this physical and mental space.
In the manner of an art of memory, LANGOREYE proposes a particularly evocative spatio-temporal structure (the here-and-now of certain works, the beyond of others, the project within the project) and, through this, generates mental images that resist time. While the mediators prepare their “text,” they also engage in spontaneous dialogue with visitors, embodying a plural voice that goes beyond the event itself, as it both precedes and outlives it. Continuously kneaded, like clay or bread dough, this voice is ceaselessly conveyed, recorded, amplified, and assembled through the works using various techniques, ranging from the telephone set to artificial intelligence, via radio, microphone, vinyl, CD, or smartphone.
The success of this exhibition lies in its pursuit of an origin of the creative gesture, in its profoundly social and ritual nature, repeatedly passing through speech, whose primary medium remains orality, regardless of technological developments.
Clara Pacquet