Claire Dehove

Claire Dehove is a diplomat artist, director of WOS/agence des hypothèses, and ambassador of the MetaNation and of the Commons. WOS was founded in Paris in 2004 and has generated “contributory devices” such as Hall de Gratuité in Bobigny, Libre Ambulantage in Dakar, the Anarchives de la Révolte and the Anarchives de la Migration. WOS experiments with artistic and political institutions, including the Ministry of Human, Animal, Plant and Elemental Affairs and Patents (MAPHAVE) in Montreal in 2015, the Embassy of the Commons in Bordeaux in 2016 and the Embassy of the MetaNation with Quebracho Théâtre in 2018 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which continued its travels as far as Beirut in 2023. Claire Dehove holds the agrégation in visual arts and a doctorate in Aesthetics and Art Sciences; she is a co-founder of and contributor to the Université du Bien Commun in Paris and an artist-researcher at the Praxis Art Sororité lab.

Lecture title: Scénographie de l’art de la diplomatie‌ [Scenography of the art of diplomacy]
Date: Tuesday 8 April 2025 at 10:30 (Beirut time)
Format: Hybrid
Venue: Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, Beirut (ALBA)
Language: French
Audience: Students of the Invisual Art atelier

Once there is no exhibition, no autonomous art object, no spectators, but new institutions – post-artistic ones, one might say – that call for community uses with their rituals, their modes of exchange and quite simply of life, and once all this is going to take place here or there, translocally, over a certain period of time, longer or shorter, with possible extensions, then scenographic devices must be devised that are capable of creating the conditions for shared experiences to emerge.
These devices can be configured minimally, with simple chairs and tables found in the occupied space, when the intervention is furtive and more or less licit. They make the most of the “already-there” offered by the place and work through displacement, customisation and hybridisation. The devices can be taken to such a degree of precision that they aim to change the status of the host venues. For example, when the Embassy of the MetaNation is officially in residence in an art centre, the centre BECOMES the embassy, with its signage, its rooms for receptions and interviews with visitors, and those devoted to its cultural service and its pseudo-administrative procedures.
How can the identity metamorphoses of spaces be made plausible for the benefit of contributory projects? What role does drafting charters of use play in a plural work? How can we counter the blind spots regarding the legal status and governance of a “commons-work”, which is born of the diagnosis and expertise of its occupants and evolves through successive activations by the community that invents its uses?
These are some of the questions, among many others, that we will address in this lecture.