Julien Previeux
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La totalité des propositions varies (avant) [The totality of true propositions (before)] 2009.

Illustrating the artist’s interest in the organization of know-how and the accumulation of knowledge, Julien Prévieux’s work on view at La Force de l’Art 02 is a bookcase holding numerous books on historically outmoded subjects that are nowadays obsolete. This new database, resulting from a lengthy task of information gathering in public and private library collections, also brings together manuals and handbooks, such as Le Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré (1959) and Windows 95 pour les nuls by Barrie Soskinsky and Christoph Benz (Sybex, 1999), as well as historical and theoretical volumes like URRS., Le pays où le soleil ne se couche pas by Emil Schulthess (Albin Michel, 1971) and La guerre secrète moderne by William V. Kennedy (Bordas, 1984), whose ideas have not survived the inexorable passage of time. Overlooked, scorned, on the sidelines of state-of-the-art knowledge, these books, once reorganized in this library of linguistic, technical and historical puzzles, still make sense. On the walls there is also a strange diagram which, devised by means of data mining, a tool making it possible to analyze databases, transforms the themes of these works into a set of crazy oracles. Like a cartographic exercise, it traces the outlines of a completely u-chronic parallel future, not without wit. Through this work, Julien Prévieux strives, based on the concept proposed by Michael Foucault, to open up heterotopias, those “other spaces” which suddenly make utopia tangible, plunging the viewer into a journey to the heart of the history of knowledge and ideas.