Robert Filliou – Longs poèmes courts à terminer chez soi, 1984

Longs poèmes courts à terminer chez soi (“Long Short Poems to Finish at Home”) gathers short poems that ask their readers to become poets themselves. As the title suggests, each poem is to be finished at home. For Robert Filliou, poetry belonged to the same “poetical economy” that informed La Cédille qui Sourit, the experimental shop and meeting place he established with George Brecht in Villefranche-sur-Mer. Within this economy, value emerged through the circulation and exchange of ideas and words. The poems pass from one person to the next, making the writing and reading of poetry a shared activity. Each can be finished in an infinite number of ways.

At the core of Robert Filliou’s practice are ideas of language, play and exchange. Trained in economics and associated with Fluxus, he conceived art as a continuous, collective activity embedded in everyday life. His work challenges conventional notions of authorship, value and production, favouring openness, humour and participation. Through gestures that blur the boundaries between art and non-art, Filliou redefined creation as an ongoing process of thinking, making and sharing, an approach that continues to shape the understanding of art as a space of exchange.