Spring cleaning – Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris
 
The duo & debates program usually exhibits the work of two offices, face to face, as if in a duel. With this joint installation, we propose not to exhibit our own work, but to undertake an exploration with the Cité of the role, the function and the future of the public institution. Possessing an exhibition space for several months prompts us to ask ourselves what the place is for, what we can do there, what will happen there later, but also what has happened there previously. We therefore propose to accompany the Cité in an introspective process and together to define not an exhibition, but the prerequisites of such an exhibition. The installation is therefore more than a simple inventory. It requires one to choose what to exhibit and what not to exhibit. It requires one to conceive the Institution also as a place where architecture is made, where the act of exhibiting is already a way of thinking about architecture. It suggests that architecture is an act that precedes its own realisation.