Projet led by: Yann Chateigné, Professor of Visual arts
Project applicant : Yann Chateigné
Team: Elisabeth Jobin, Dan Solbach, Pierre Leguillon, Emilie Parendeau, Mathieu Copeland
Co-applicants: Thierry Davila, Lionel Bovier, David Lemaire (MAMCO), John M Armleder
Contact: Elisabeth Jobin
Website: archivesecart.ch
Funding: HES-SO

Hosting a variety of activities including an artists’ collective, a user-supported community centre, a publishing house, a library and a teahouse, Ecart was active in Geneva from 1969 to 1982. The alternative venue was established jointly by Genevans John M. Armleder, Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner and contributed to the promotion of practices related to the Fluxus movement (especially performance, artist’s books and mail art) in Europe as well as in the US, as evidenced by the prints, correspondence and documentary pictures collected or created by the artists in charge of the place. Filed by John Armleder in Geneva’s Art and History Museum, these non-inventoried documents attest to an activity that was particularly responsive to art forms which developed outside of commercial circuits, and to approaches that endeavoured to demystify works and their authors, i.e. a frame of mind specific to the 1970s.

In association with Geneva’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO), this project aims to archive this collection and to make it accessible to several types of audiences through exhibitions, publications and reactivations. In this way, it will attest to the artistic proliferation that happened in Geneva in the 1970s, which turned the city into a haven for international artists.

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