«Pocket Mirrors» – A Temporary Exhibition at the Institut Français de Madrid

The day after the magnificent and spectacular opening night on Wednesday, May 27th, everything had to be shut down. For safety reasons, there was a risk of electrical power surge.

Nevertheless, it remains an extraordinary experience, and the audience in attendance was able to fully appreciate the outstanding quality of the creations.

The 10th and 11th-grade visual arts elective students (2nde and 1ère) taught by Arnaud Stosse-Valentin explored the concepts of portraiture and self-portraiture through an everyday object: the mobile phone. Serving simultaneously as a capturing tool, a recording surface, and a broadcasting interface, the phone became a fully-fledged artistic medium here.

Working with used phones—some broken, some still functional—the participants were invited to experiment with various approaches:
– Transforming the object through collage or assembly.
– Using the screen as a medium for broadcasting images.
– Exploring technical glitches (cracked screens, bugs, capture defects) as a visual language.

The project questions how identities are constructed today through screens, and how they contribute to the creation, staging, and circulation of self-images.

It offers a collective reflection based on these individual productions regarding contemporary issues of representation and image circulation.

This sudden end to the exhibition reminds us of the obsolescence of all things.

A video montage created by Maxime Horovyy (class 107) will be broadcast on a loop at the venue until June 19th.

Our thanks to Mr. Laurent Bertat (Deputy Cultural Counselor), Mr. Gilles Martinez (Principal of the LFM), Mr. Buzet (Vice-Principal), Ms. Nancy Berthier (Director of the Casa de Velázquez), Ms. Claude Bussac (Director of Artistic Studies), Mr. Paul Lalloz (Director of the Institut français de Madrid), and Mr. Romain Ruchaud (Head of Programming and Cultural Coordination) for their presence and support.
And a special thank you to Ms. Gema Mediavilla from FAIN Ascensores, who was a wonderful patron by providing a titanic quantity of phones from her company.