A first major monograph on Thierry Fournier's practice, French visual artist, with an extensive documentation of many recent works and a collection of texts and interviews. The book is edited by Claire Chatelet and Juliette Fontaine.
Thierry Fournier's works play with language and the digital to question the limits of the human and its otherness: a CCTV camera that has a burn-out, a screen that questions the human nature of those who look at it, a device that explores aloud the space it occupies, photos of police violence where all the policemen are erased, a tomb that never finds the right sentence to end it all...
Some of these works animate objects through behaviour, others create relationships with the public, or hijack data from the web... Most suggest that they are entities, endowed with a kind of sentience. When they speak, their words are familiar and we might, not without humour, recognise our own weaknesses in them: the machine would be as human as we are. The work as a whole reflects an assertive critical stance, in which technologies are never used for what they would enable, and even less for a dream of immersion, but to evoke
what we expect of them—and above all what this expectation says about us, as humans.
L'Espace de l'entre [which could be translated as "The Space in Between"] is a monograph as well as a reflection and dialogue between the artist and a number of interlocutors on his practice and a selection of 21 works created between 2008 and 2024, approached through four themes:
entities,
texts and flows,
space-time and
politics.
The title of the book is inspired by art historian
Aby Warburg's notion of
Zwischenraum, which evokes the in-between space where artworks unfold, in a critical interval between the subject and the world—an interval that is constantly replayed in Thierry Fournier's works.
The book is co-edited by Claire Chatelet, lecturer and researcher at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, and Juliette Fontaine, artist, curator and author. It brings together three previously unpublished texts by Claire Chatelet, philosopher and researcher Jean Cristofol and Juliette Fontaine, as well as three unpublished interviews between Thierry Fournier and, respectively: Juliette Fontaine, Franck Ancel, psychoanalyst and artist, and Emmanuel Simiand, psychoanalyst, author and film-maker. The last two interviews are moderated by artist and researcher Damien Beyrouthy. These texts alternate with presentations of Thierry Fournier's works, with QR codes allowing to watch documentation videos on his website.
Thierry Fournier (born 1960 in Lyon) is an artist, curator and author. An architect by training, he is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Lyon. His practice addresses issues of otherness, co-presence and sociality, using a wide range of media, often digital: installations, networked works, photographies, films, drawings... His approach as a curator explores similar issues on a collective scale. His work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad. He lives and works in the Perche region.
As an author, Thierry Fournier has written about numerous international artists and exhibitions. He is also artistic director and co-coordinator of antiAtlas Journal, an online journal which deals with contemporary issues and forms of borders. He is also an art teacher. After co-directing several curatorial research groups (ENSAD, Ensad Nancy), he now runs the contemporary art workshop The Exercice of Gaze at Sciences Po Paris.
A campaigner for fairer working conditions for art workers, in 2014 he co-founded and then co-hosted the group Économie Solidaire de l'Art [a French equivalent of Paying Artists group] until 2019. In 2024, he co-conceived a similar project within Hacnum, the French national network for digital arts.
