Ministry of Hobbies

Living since early childhood with his ‘pet illnesses’, Benoît Piéron has for many years been developing a body of work where the medical world has become his frame of reference; shaping his imagination, his relationship to time and to creation. Against any heroic vision of the struggle with sickness, he encourages us to go beyond a binary conception of the living as a simple life/death opposition.

His work has evolved over time towards a gently subversive exploration of the lands of the ‘valid’, from the vantage point of his ‘invalid’ body. His pieces draw on a diversity of creative practices extending from sewing to gardening.

At Le Grand Café, Benoît Piéron invites us to the ‘Ministry of Hobbies’ to talk about life by means of the intimate and disrupt our perceptions. With great delicacy he constructs a work where imagination and desire mix with the thickness of time and the survival of bodies, in an atmosphere where dreams meet the everyday.