The artistic project

Wander the streets of Lyon long enough and you will find them. Make your way across the city often enough and you will use them: the traboules — a unique system of semi-secret passageways, courtyards and staircases; a labyrinthine network of liminal spaces conceived to facilitate flow. Thought to have first appeared in the fourth century CE to guarantee easy access to the waterways, these modes of connection and circulation later spread to Vieux Lyon, the Presqu’île and the slopes of CroixRousse where, from the 19th century onwards, they ensured safe and speedy passage between the silk-weaving, mercantile, commercial and banking districts.

Much like their glass-roofed, marble-panelled counterparts in Paris, which likewise proliferated during the boom in the textile trade in the early 19th century, the passages of Lyon embody the threshold architecture of dreams. Blurring the boundaries between public and private, inside and outside, above ground and underground, darkness and light, they give rise to a realm at once literal and figurative. Yet whereas the Paris arcades exemplify the rise of consumption and commodification of urban space, Lyon’s traboules are associated with labour and industry, workers’ uprisings and resistance to the German occupation during the Second World War, and more recently with closures linked to gentrification. An integral part of a city renowned, since its founding in 43 BCE, as a major hub for trade, industry and finance, the traboules form the point of departure for the adventure in thought that is the 18th Biennale of Contemporary Art. For the first time, the biennial brings this pivotal aspect of Lyon’s psychogeography to the fore.

To pass from one dream to another, the main title of this biennale edition, draws upon German philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, 1927–1940). In this sprawling fragment, a “theater of all [his] struggles and all [his] ideas”¹, Benjamin examines how urban environments, particularly the Parisian arcades, shape the collective dreams and experiences of society. He treats the arcades as threshold spaces in which the dreamworld of modernity becomes legible. Within these passages, where traces of past lives, forgotten movements and invisible labour persist, history does not unfold as a continuous process but appears in moments of arrest — brief constellations in which its underlying structures are suddenly revealed. “Every epoch,” he writes, “not only dreams the one to follow but, in thus dreaming, precipitates its awakening”².

It is precisely such moments of dreaming and historical awakening that the Biennale, in engaging with the history and present of Lyon in relation to broader planetary conditions, seeks to invoke through the many voices it brings to bear on the economy. The economy is understood here as an infrastructure: the set of entangled processes through which interdependent beings gain, transform and circulate what sustains their existence, whether material or immaterial. In its etymological sense (from the Greek oikos and nomos), it also refers to the governance, or management, of the household. These reflections in turn give rise to a quest for a new economic imaginary.

It is a quest equally inspired by a moment in 1976: French Fluxus artist and economist Robert Filliou chats with German art critic Irmeline Lebeer about the origins of his Principes d’économie poétique. His economic “treatise”, Filliou tells Lebeer, was born of his experiences of art in the 1960s which had sought to bring about social transformation by means of artistic strategies. During this period, he had come to the conclusion that there would first need to be a revolution in economic structures before there could be any profound or enduring social change. He felt that if the material realities were left unaltered, if the systemic issues remained intact — energy crises, extractive capitalism, unequal distribution, austerity measures and wage gaps — any social achievements in terms of rights, representation or justice would be superficial and short-lived. Business would simply go on as usual³.

Once Filliou had recognised the primacy of the economy, he set himself the task, as he put it, of doing for his times what Karl Marx had done for his own with Das Kapital, his groundbreaking critique of political economy. As tongue-in-cheek as such ambitions might have been in the context of Fluxus, Filliou was very clear about two things: first, that any new economic imaginary begins by developing a new theory of value⁴; and second, that the development of such a theory begins with research, which, he insists, is “not the privilege of those who know but the domain of those who don’t know”⁵. This realm of permanent creation, of open-ended political imagination, he conceived as an eternal network, or continuous celebration, of everyone and everything engaged in an everlasting metabolism of “manifestations, meanderings, meditations, microcosms, macrocosms, mixtures, meanings …”⁶.

Taking bankruptcy as its point of departure, Filliou’s Fête Permanente counters personal crisis with connection, conviviality and creativity, positing value as relational rather than financial. It withdraws from systems of profit and measurement and instead opens to everyone an infrastructure of generosity and exchange, stupidity, failure, experiment and play, thereby subverting the economic logic that underpins both capitalism and the art market. Like Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Filliou’s vision finds its material analogue in the psychogeography of the city, in the spaces and temporalities of waking and dreaming.

Centring around three principal venues — the macLYON, Les Grandes Locos and the Musée des Tissus — the biennale parcours extends across sites throughout the city. Each venue draws on its own architecture and atmosphere to explore the entangled economies that bring human and more-than-human beings, animate and inanimate matter into relation.

Across these sites, the enquiry takes shape through three interwoven layers: the existential at macLYON, attending to conditions of life and death, inheritance and debt; the relational at the Musée des Tissus, focusing on forms of connection, care and exchange; and the industrial at Les Grandes Locos, engaging processes of extraction, transformation, circulation and flow. Rather than representing discrete themes, these layers overlap and inform one another, forming a framework, a lens, a passage through which existing and yet-to-be-imagined economies can be approached.

At the heart of each principal venue is La Fête Permanente, a convivial space that takes Robert Filliou’s idea of art as an ongoing, collective process and gives it a physical, participatory form. Made up of second-hand sofas, armchairs and other movable elements, these settings invite visitors to sit, shift things around and spend time together. They host conversations, performances, radio and video broadcasts, bringing in voices from across Lyon’s different sectors and communities, from the petrochemical to the party industry, from aged care to car repair, from banking to urban gardening. Rather than a fixed programme, La Fête Permanente offers a space for making and doing things – in keeping with Filliou’s Principle of Equivalence – “well”, “badly” or “not at all”⁷.

Gathering artists, agencies and artefacts from diverse geographies and temporalities, each venue operates on its own terms, yet together they form a coherent whole. It is not necessary to follow a fixed sequence of sites in order to engage with the enquiry. Still, following the parcours reveals an underlying dramaturgy, an inner logic that carries one from site to site, holding the biennial together as a passage from one state, one register, one dream to another.

Catherine Nichols, curator

1. Walter Benjamin in a letter to Gershom Sholem, 20 January 1930, Briefe, vol. 2, edited and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966, 506.

2. Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935”, in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 13.

3. Robert Filliou in Anders Krueger and Irmeline Lebeer (dir.), Robert Filliou : The Secret of Permanent Creation, cat. exp., M HKA Anvers, Milan, Editions Lebeer Hossmann/Mousse Publishing, 2017, 58.

4. Ibid.

5. Robert Filliou, “Research at the Stedelijk”, in Das immerwährende Ereignis zeigt / The Eternal Network Presents / La Fête Permanente présente : Robert Filliou, dir. Michael Erlhoff, Hanovre, Paris, Berne, Sprengel-Museum/Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/Kunsthalle Bern, 1984, 148.

6. George Brecht and Robert Filliou, Banqueroute (Bankruptcy), 1968, published by the artists in Villefranche-sur-Mer, March 1968, Collection M HKA Antwerp, illustrated in Anders Krueger and Irmeline Lebeer (eds), Robert Filliou: The Secret of Permanent Creation, exh. cat. M HKA Antwerp, Milan: Editions Lebeer Hossmann/Mousse Publishing, 2017, 32.

7. Robert Filliou, in “Principle of Equivalence”, in Das immerwährende Ereignis zeigt / The Eternal Network Presents / La Fête Permanente présente: Robert Fillliou, ed. Michael Erlhoff, Hanover, Paris, Bern: Sprengel-Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthalle Bern, 1984, 59.

Catherine Nichols is an internationally renowned curator and writer of Australian origin based in Berlin. Her work moves between contemporary art, cultural history and interdisciplinary research. She was the curator of Manifesta 14 Prishtina (2022) and has led numerous major exhibitions and long-term projects in Europe. Nichols is currently a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. Her practice is marked by close attention to context, narrative and the relationship between artworks, sites and audiences.

In 2026, Frieze magazine named Catherine Nichols one of six curators to watch.