The Grammar of Belonging
Group Exhibition · August 24–31, 2026
17 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris
How do we learn to belong—and what changes within us along the way?
The Grammar of Belonging brings together six artistic practices to explore the unspoken rules that shape social life. Through language, family rituals, domestic spaces, bodily gestures and administrative systems, the exhibition examines how belonging is learned, negotiated and granted.
Moving between intimate experience and public structures, the works reveal the quiet expectations embedded in everyday encounters: how to speak, where to sit, how to move, and which parts of ourselves to present. Together, they ask what it means to enter a new social world—and how much of ourselves we translate in the process.
Artists & Works
Jiangyu Huang — Symbolic Passage (2026)
A figure moves through an unfamiliar landscape, running, pausing and observing. These gestures become attempts to read the cultural codes that govern access and acceptance. Huang approaches social mobility as a continuous act of translation, questioning what remains of the self when belonging requires constant adaptation.
Camille Varenne — La voix corrigée / The Corrected Voice (2026)
A multichannel sound installation traces the changing voice of a single self-introduction across domestic, educational and professional settings. As accent, rhythm and vocabulary are corrected, the work asks whose voice emerges—and whose becomes harder to hear.
Étienne Delcourt — Avant de prendre place / Before Taking a Seat (2025)
A dining table becomes a site of instruction. Quiet directives about manners, conversation and posture reveal how everyday rituals transmit social expectations across generations. A place at the table comes with rules for occupying it.
Lucie Kermeur — Les mesures du provisoire / The Dimensions of the Temporary (2026)
Overlapping floor plans, movable partitions and displaced doorframes bring the dimensions of different rented homes into one space. Visitors navigate the gaps between them, encountering belonging as a physical negotiation shaped by movement, memory and temporary residence.
Adrien Valette — La posture juste / The Proper Posture (2025)
Across three screens, a performer rehearses ordinary actions under a stream of corrections. Entering a room, shaking hands and sitting down become exercises in social legibility, revealing the effort behind gestures that appear natural.
Maëlle Desforges — Veuillez indiquer votre appartenance / Please State Your Belonging (2026)
An interactive installation invites visitors to complete fictional forms whose questions grow increasingly difficult to answer. The resulting documents expose the distance between lived experience and the categories through which institutions attempt to define it.
Visit
August 24–31, 2026
17 rue Chapon
75003 Paris, France
