Dearest Banlieues brings together over 200 works, including archival documents, paintings, installations, videos, photographs, and personal testimonies, exploring the suburbs as complex, sensitive spaces. The exhibition moves beyond fixed or stigmatized portrayals to reveal these places as sites of memory and cultural transmission.
The exhibition unfolds in three successive sections across the temporary galleries of Palais de la Porte Dorée museum. A continuous curved wall runs through the entire space, serving as both a spatial and narrative thread. Its convex shape symbolically embodies the diverse imagery associated with the suburbs: countryside, borders, walls, slums, outskirts, large low-income housing projects, and more.
This line is interrupted at several points by installations, objects, and structures that cross it, break its flow, or attach to it. These elements create moments of pause and shifts in rhythm, activating specific functions: a projection area, a press lounge, and an art installation.
The material palette reflects the concept of bittersweet suburbs, playing on the contrast between raw, urban-inspired materials and muted, calming tones that introduce a subtle softness within the installation’s strict framework. This interplay between roughness and delicacy is embedded in the gallery’s very architecture, marked by its elegant flooring and an exposed, unfinished ceiling.
