Chambre des échos : Ping City

Palais de Tokyo

With Hugo Béhérégaray, Július Koller and Rachael Woodson with the associations Le Monde Est À Nous and l'AS Corbeil-Essonnes Tennis de Table. La chambre des échos celebrates the cultural twinning between the Palais de Tokyo and the city of Corbeil-Essonnes, showcasing a series of artistic projects developed with local associations around ping-pong. In Corbeil-Essonnes, whose 303 ping-pong tables have earned it the nickname "cité des 300 tables," ping-pong is both a sporting practice and a space of sociability: it unfolds throughout the city and invites us to look at it in a new way. Photographer Rachael Woodson conducted an introductory workshop in analog photography there with two associations — one dedicated to photography, the other to ping-pong. Here, the image becomes a field of experimentation: a space where the rules can be shifted, bypassed, reinvented, and where performance and documentation intertwine. With this same intention of shifting frameworks, the project engages in dialogue with that of Hugo Béhérégaray, created with the table tennis association of Corbeil-Essonnes: a ping-pong table collectively designed as a work to be activated, so as to rethink the rules of this sport. These proposals resonate with several historical works by Július Koller (1939–2007), who, as early as the 1970s, transformed the exhibition space into a ping-pong club in order to collectively imagine new possible forms of social relations. In the context of post-Prague Spring, marked by censorship and repression, the playing field became for him an alternative model of political experimentation accessible to everyone. Whether in Koller's works or the projects carried out in Corbeil-Essonnes, ping-pong acts as a common thread running through the social fabric. Both a popular practice and a high-level sport, it sits at the boundary between leisure, artistic gesture and performance. But above all, it remains what it has never ceased to be: a game. La chambre des Échos La Chambre des échos is a space for programming and cultural mediation. It offers exhibitions and events of variable scale and duration in the free reception area of the Palais de Tokyo. It is conceived as a flexible and responsive space, inspired by the logic of cultural rights, which aims to recognize the right of every person or group to participate in cultural life and to express their culture. Free access from the lobby of the Palais de Tokyo.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗