Passerelle has invited Atelier Magma to put on a unique joint exhibition. Atelier Magma is an association created in 2023 by and for a group of artists and designers from Brest and Finistère. The objective is to bring together artists from the local area to experience and manage a collaborative workspace. And for a very good reason, as times of sharing, meeting and reflecting stimulate creativity and promote the cross-fertilisation of practices. The need to do this was obvious: you had to get together in order to exist and create.

So this group has no particular coherence or common artistic practice. The people in the group know each other partly from an experience at the former Cercle Naval in Brest – the city of Brest kindly made available artists’ workshops in 2021 for local artists who responded to a call for projects – and partly from the emergence of the Art Schools of Brittany, in particular the Brest site of the European Academy of Art in Brittany. The members of Atelier Magma have never exhibited together and for some of them this is their first opportunity to show their works in the setting of a contemporary art centre.

The exhibition brings together 17 artists or collectives as members of Magma. Although the body of work varies hugely, one theme may be perceived: notions of traces and memory. “What remains of a collaboration between artists and the inhabitants of a place? Which moments of life should be preserved and in what forms? Which reality should we safeguard or modify?” are all questions demanding to be answered when you visit the exhibition. Through the clues and propositions offered by many of these artists, an important and implicit questioning gradually emerges: what is the place of the artist in our current society that is so polarised?