Introducing La Galerie du Cartable

In 1990, at the Marcel Duchamp College in Châteauroux, an experimental art school focused on collective creation, Fabrice Cotinat, David Legrand, and Henrique Martins-Duarte met and began working together.

But it was in 1999 that they decided to fully commit to a collective work by creating the Galerie du Cartable: a portable audiovisual structure in which, alternately, directors, stage managers, actors, and screenwriters, they invest in audiovisual creation through the video satchel – a space for projection and nomadic creation – and practice an inventive cinema whose originality lies in low-tech filming devices and stagings constrained by makeshift architectures. Since then, it is under this signature that they identify their work, positioning their productions between the creation of situations, interventions, and the making of portable, performative films.

"We were already part of a group, a history, a family of artists without knowing it. Then, in 1999, we remembered, and we created the Galerie du Cartable, a free medium liberated from the usual distribution norms, a child of the Situationists, Existentialists, and Lettrists. Making art meant much more than creating visual arts: for us, everything was creation, including our existence. Changing our life meant transforming artistic structures into spaces we would love."

"Yes, just as we love our anarchic, rule-free artistic life today, we must change the artistic structures so that they become places we would love. We should, therefore, change the artistic structures so that they become places we would love. We must change the artistic structures so that they become the place, spaces we would love, common spaces excluded from control."