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The Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), in partnership with the Virreina Centre de la Imatge de Barcelona, presents Número tres, de la casa a la fábrica. This exhibition of photography and video reconsiders the link between work and home, thirty-seven years after Jean-Luc Godard's film Numéro deux.

Inspired by the Jean-Luc Godard's fusion of house and factory, Número tres offers a new take on the forms, ideas, and figures invented by Godard for his1975 film Numéro deux, in which the filmmaker proposed to 'think of the house in terms of a factory.'

Godard ... even went so far as to associate the mother with the landscape and the father with the factory, in a bold reiteration of the pictorial dialectic between content and form. If the factory itself remains situated in the landscape today, it is now delocalized, emptied of its machines, on which other workers work elsewhere, wherever the market decided to transport them, disassembled, on cargo ships. Through a selection of contemporary representations of domestic life, urban landscapes, and gestures of love and labor, the exhibition traces new paths from house to factory, from home to work, between these two spaces that so far apart and yet so close. Since Godard's film, relationships and family structures, as well as economic and social structures, have changed considerably, and the problems evoked in Numéro deux have accentuated in the era of globalization.

Related programming

In conjunction with the exhibition, the CNAP presents Número cuatro/Pantallas paralelas, a program comprised of films and speakers discussing artworks, literary texts, and theoretical works that interrogate the privatization of public space and the publicizing of private space, between the factory and the home, that Godard's film addresses. Within the field of new documentary practices representative of contemporary creation in its broadest sense are works by Louidgi Beltrame, Harun Farocki, Dora Garcia, Valérie Jouve, Florence Lazar, Martin Le Chevallier, François Nouguiès, Julien Prévieux, Marie Reinert, AlejandraRiera, Philippe Schwinger and Frédéric Moser, and Marie Voignier. The new representations of the self and the world that emerge in the works featured in this program point to a political approach to the filmic account that constructs a politics of the subject.

Curated by Pascal Beausse, Curator of Photographic Collections, CNAP and Pascale Cassagnau, Curator in charge of cinema, video, new media, CNAP.

The Centre national des arts plastiques

In 2012, the Centre national des arts plastiques is offering several exhibitions centered around photography, including notably Número tres, de la casa a la fábrica at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona and an exhibition at the Rencontres d'Arles featuring the work of recent graduates of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie. The Centre national des arts plastiques is one of the main actors of the Ministry of Culture and Communication's policies concerning contemporary visual art. A cultural and economic agent, the CNAP helps foster a diverse artistic scene and provides support to artists as well as art world professionals through several channels. On behalf of the State, it acquires works of art and is responsible for preserving and diffusing those works throughout France and abroad. In order to advance its mission of promoting the arts, the CNAP commissions works on behalf of the nation. It is collaborates to produce large-scale contemporary art events like the Triennale, Monumenta, and the French pavilion at the Venice Biennial. It is particularly committed to ensuring that all audiences have access to contemporary art.