1974, PASSÉ, PRÉSENT, FUTUR BY RAPHAEL GIANNESINI

1974, PASSÉ, PRÉSENT, FUTUR BY RAPHAEL GIANNESINI
31st August, 2024 – 22nd September, 2024
Villa Benkemoun
915 chemin de la Batelle
13200 Arles

It was back in August 1974, that the Benkemoun family moved into the villa in Arles that now bears their name and built by the architect Emile Sala (1913-1998). Half a century later, Brigitte Benkemoun will be celebrating their anniversary with a major exhibition entitled “1974- ̈Past, Present, Future“, which will run from the 30th August to the 29th September in the house, which has been designated as 20th-century heritage site.

Between a bygone past and a future present, the Villa Benkemoun, total architecture and domestic utopia, stands among the Provençal farmhouses, like a vision of the future. To celebrate the anniversary of this project, which in fifty years has gone from a family home to a cultural institution, is to return to its roots, to the year 1974, when Simone and Pierre Benkemoun, driven by a faith in the future, entrusted their dreams to Émile Sala, the architect of late modernism and builder of a new art of living.
But what kind of future did this Villa dream of, and what kind of past is it still preserving today? “1974, Passé, Présent, Futur ” is a return to the origins of the mythologies inherited from the Thirty Glorious, but also to the first disillusions born of the oil crisis and political upheaval.

In this crossroads between utopia and reality, involving art, design, music and fashion, the exhibition will engage in a dialogue with all the universes and atmospheres that compose the cosmology of this singular architecture.

This walk through space and time will bring together visionary artists, plastic prophecies and radical thoughts that shaped the narratives and counter-narratives of the times to come. As a mirror image, it will invite contemporary artists and designers to question the legacy of this year through site-specific works, and thus to grasp the history of forms and the trajectory of a world whose future, today as yesterday, seems an idea to be invented.

LIST OF EXHIBITING ARTISTS

1974, PASSÉ, PRÉSENT, FUTUR BY RAPHAEL GIANNESINI opens on the 31st of August, 2024 until the 22nd of September, 2024 at Villa Benkemoun

©2024 Villa Benkemoun