A bibliobus beautiful as a truck

When, after forty years of good and loyal service, the time has come to replace the library of the Maisons-Alfort media libraries, it was to artists Martine Feipel (born in 1975) and Jean Bechameil (born in 1964) that the city, well informed, wished to entrust its visual identity. It was a question of designing a standard bearer image capable of conveying everywhere-literally-access to culture. The project had the strength of the evidence for the duo of Franco-Luxembourg sculptors, whose work is nourished by the history of political and aesthetic utopias of the 20th century. The enthusiastic pair did not start from a blank page. The body painted from the previous library, the solar design of which resulted from an anonymous but inspired intervention, had indeed marked the minds of the housenais. Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil kept her stylized sunshine pattern by declining it on all sides of the truck and purifying it. There remains in their very joyful proposal an orange round (where art lovers will be able to see a distant echo at the founding work Printing, rising sunfrom Claude Monet). The new gleaming machine has been put into service a year ago: 2,000 pounds, newspapers, DVDs, etc., circulates daily to meet schools and residents of the eccentric districts of Maisons-Alfort where the bibliobus acts as an appointment point. While the National Center for Book continues to see an alarming fall in the practice of reading, especially in the 50-64 year old tranche, we know how it constitutes a crucial social issue. Will this real mobile sculpture, the only one to date made by Feipel & Bechameil, will enter the history of art? In any case, she already made an appearance noticed last May at the Festival of Art History organized by the National Institute of Art History (INHA) and the Château de Fontainebleau as part of a partnership with the Maisons-Alfort media libraries. As for Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil, after accepting an order from the Luxembourg National Library, they have just been selected to create a work that will take place in the Toulouse metro.