About

“Un jour, j’écrirai pour toi un long récit, il n’y manquera pas un détail,
pas une lumière de bougie, pas une saveur, pas une orange, un long
récit de ce que furent les galettes de Pourim à El-Biar, quand j’avais dix ans et que déjà je ne comprenais rien”.

Jacques Derrida, La carte postale, de Socrate à Freud et au-delà

Pas une Orange is a non-profit contemporary art project founded by Aurélien Le Genissel in May 2021. Its first iteration takes place in the former space of Bombon Projects, Calle de Trafalgar 45 in Barcelona, in which we present a series of exhibitions and activities. The proposal was born with the desire to dialogue with artists from other scenes and aims to explore in the future new ways of exhibition, support and collaboration beyond the simple presentation of works in a stable space.


Pas une Orange [Not an orange], then. Or maybe yes. In fact, it seems to be on the logo. Like Magritte's famous pipe (first reference), when the writing seems to contradict the image. But perhaps it’s not really the case and we should rather consider what is lurking behind the language, this articulation between the different visual grammars, this way of communicating with its own outside, as Deleuze would say (second reference).

How to define the project then? What is indeed a definition? If this is not a kind of delimitation, a hindrance, already. To begin with. We will therefore need to seek out the contours, to be described by opposition, in spite of ourselves – the negation of the name is also about that. In that sense, Pas une Orange is not a gallery. It's not just a project space either. Even if it can be too. It’s not an exhibition center. It is not an institution.

It is becoming, in the exact sense in which Gilles Deleuze –him again, in the same text- specifies that "to become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentation”1. A tentative to inoperative art projects, as another famous philosopher would say, in times where fluidity, non-binary, indetermination don’t seem to apply to the cultural agents.

^︎1 DELEUZE, Gilles, Crítica y clínica, traducción de Thomas Kauf, Barcelona, Editorial Anagrama, 1993, p. 11

It is also a potentiality that is the blink of an eye. A wink to Jacques Derrida’s literary jewel (third reference):

«One day I will write a long story for you, not a detail will be missing, not a candle light, not a flavor, not an orange, a long story about the Purim cakes in EI-Biar, when I was ten years old and already understood nothing»1

Pas une Orange will reflect on this articulation of narratives (language, representation, body, sound,
image, form, etc.) at the ages of storytelling and visual saturation.

For now it’s an art space located in Barcelona.

This will surely evolve. Elsewhere. In other ways.

With different forms, becoming something else. We will then complete this statement.

After all, sometimes poets think oranges are blue (fourth reference).

                                                                         with the support of