Every week throughout 2013, 50 contemporary art centres will advance a hypothesis through the online magazine uncoupdedés.net (“un coup de dés” means “a roll of the dice”).

The art centres are celebrating cultural decentralisation through this online magazine, an open chronicle linked to their respective programmes. It is an opportunity to see the diversity of approaches to art offered by d.c.a’s 50 member art centres: original, unusual contributions spotlighting the artistic constellation that these centres display with their programmes throughout France.

This digital space promotes the concrete action that each art centre is undertaking on its own territory, but it also highlights these decentralised organisations’ shared tasks, their purpose, as well as the thought, production, support, creation and transmission network that they have been representing for the past thirty years throughout France and internationally.

Week after week on uncoupdedes.net, visitors will find diverse reflections on contemporary art. Like a throw of the dice, pages on the site appear in random order, enabling visitors to read, see or hear contributions from different personalities, figures of the world of art and culture (artists, curators, critics, philosophers, researchers, sociologists…). Every art centre plays its own card, in a spirit of experimentation and research, which are fundamental tasks that arise at every stage of its activity, from the production of a work to its reception.

The art centres closely support artistic creation by offering artists contexts that are original and in constant movement. The idea of sharing this research with all members of the public lies at the heart of the project of the art centres, which are, from this perspective, devising new forms of discourse and inventing new languages by means of a very dynamic editorial and mediation policy.

“Every Thought Emits a Roll of the Dice”

Artist Marcel Broodthaers considers Mallarmé the “founder of contemporary art.” He regards the score-poem A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance as our era’s treatise on the de-hierarchisation of art.

France’s art centres have emerged “decentralised,” most often on the impetus of a local association, of artists, and sometimes also of local authorities and the government. uncoupdedés.net approaches institutional decentralisation from the perspective of the displacement of boundaries between genres, styles and conventions, since the art centres are constantly finding new ways to transmit knowledge and production methods…

Decentralisation is considered in its symbolic and perceptible aspects, giving preference, over notions of capital, province, periphery, city, countryside and suburb, to notions of constellations and archipelagos—so many territories and audiences that give substance to the gamble of acting under “a new collective heaven.”

uncoupdedés.net, a project of d.c.a / the French association for the development of centres d’art

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.