Catherine Branger
Ne pas plier - Espace Job

Built in the 1930s by architect Pierre Thuriès, the Job flagship building is part of Toulouse’s 20th-century industrial heritage : formerly a paper mill, it stands as a true emblem of industrial, working-class, and social history. The Job collective worked for many years to transform it, and in 2011, they created Espace Job, a cultural center in the Sept Deniers district.

Invited by Espace Job, I intervened temporarily on the exterior walls of this building in 2023.

My starting point was the history of this place. Since a sheet of paper is at the origin of part of my artistic work, I decided to place there the image I use in some of my paintings : the view of a striped and folded A4 sheet of paper. This drawing was visible from the street because it was created in an imposing format of 8 meters wide. The printed paper was pasted onto a corner of the building, at the entrance, and was therefore also “folded.”

I then made visible, by playing with the openings of the space such as windows, doors and ventilation grilles, the idea of ​​a place open to the public as an invitation. A guiding thread led, as the visitor moved through the space, to a part of my formal work appearing on two PVC tarpaulins and allowed the visit to conclude with photographic prints of gouaches in more intimate formats from the In situ series and in particular those from the In situ - Espace Job series, all of which were pasted on the wall adjacent to the entrance door in the relax area.

This project, fullfilled with the help of a team of managers from the cultural center, was a very enriching experience of collaborative work.

Installées au cœur du quartier des Sept Deniers, ces peintures construites sur un jeu de l’artiste autour d’une feuille de papier rayée et pliée, se posent comme un clin d’œil à l’histoire du lieu : cette usine à papier couché haut de gamme devenue aujourd’hui un espace de création artistique, ancré sur une vie locale et associative riche.

Rachel Guerroumi