Florian Fouché — Manifeste assisté, 2015 - en cours

“We are all assisted and assistants at the same time.” This conviction lies at the heart of Florian Fouché’s ongoing project Assisted Manifesto, begun in 2015 following his father Philippe’s stroke. To rethink what it means to assist another person, Florian Fouché draws on the work of the French educator Fernand Deligny. He adapts Deligny’s notion of “close presences” – the adults who accompanied nonspeaking autistic children in experimental communities – into what he calls “close actions”. These improvised actions unfold through gestures, objects and everyday encounters and form the basis of the project’s films, sculptures and performances. At the Musée des Tissus, three films follow different strands of the project: Philippe, documenting actions with the artist’s father; Aberrant Memory, developed from Deligny’s work; and Assisted Life, centred on institutional care. The objects shown in dialogue with the videos were among those used in the actions.

In Florian Fouché’s practice, existing objects and situations are translated into new materials or contexts through operations involving distance, delegation, or constraint, producing slightly shifted forms where humour coexists with a deeper instability. The artist dedicates his practice to exploring the assistant/assisted relationship, conceived as a shared condition. Drawing on documentary sources and lived situations, he approaches “assisted living” as a material and political field, at the intersection of dependency, care and institutional systems.