UltraCoal, CEAAC, Strasbourg

From June 18 to October 16, COAL presents Ultralocal, the last exhibition of its trilogy Think global, Act local at the Centre Européen d’Actions Artistiques Contemporaines in Strasbourg.

Ultralocal revisits and reverses the notion of utopia through a set of experiments conducted by the artists in the exhibition in specific ultralocal contexts.

From the point of view of ecology and sustainable development, the organization, materials and creations that will perform best differ in each environmental, cultural and technical context. The idea must, each time, be readapted in a form of creolity and recreation that makes it vary and adapt to each location. The global idea is thus declined in local application, it becomes glocal.

Within Ultralocal, the artists revisit the very notion of utopia. In our time, it can no longer be an elsewhere. It is no longer reproducible by copying and pasting. It must be invented here and now. For today and tomorrow. In short, the artists whose proposals aim to implement a sustainable development are situationists to the end, as opposed to utopia, which, etymologically, is defined as an absolute ideal, devoid of place. Here, on the contrary, it is the localization and the immediate context, which become the very materials of the creation which tends, by its singularity, to reach the universality.

The artists of Ultralocal propose their works as means as much as tracks to support the reappropriation of the city by the citizens, to invent new practices and to remember the forgotten ones, to adapt to the changes induced by globalization or to question the current functioning of the art market, of the industry or of the economy of a whole country. A generous exhibition, at the frontiers of disciplines and codes, symbols of contemporary artistic creation, Ultralocal introduces itself into the cracks of our societies to pirate, with poetry and humor, reality.