As part of its collaboration with the madd-bordeaux, which is currently closed for expansion and modernisation work, the Capc has invited Bordeaux-based artist Benoît Maire to curate an exhibition to ensure that the public continues to have access to this important collection of decorative arts and design.

For several years now, Benoît Maire has been exploring the relationship between art and design, firstly in his personal artistic practice, but also as a curator with the Foncteurs d’oubli exhibition presented at the Frac Ile-de-France in 2019, and as co-founder in 2018 with his partner Marie Corbin of the Ker-Xavier publishing house, which produces limited editions mixing art and design.

To design Cronos, Benoît Maire first selected around a hundred objects of varying status and use from the madd-bordeaux collection, covering the entire temporal period of the collection - the 800 years between the 13^th and 21^st centuries. Starting from the premise that everyday objects bear witness to our relationship with the world, with nature and with technology, Benoît Maire proposes a temporal journey through our obsessive relationship with objects, one of inter-devotion. Like the Greek god Cronos swallowing his offspring, the exhibition is a chronological mirror of a reversal. It revolves around our relationship with objects. Although objects were originally designed and produced to serve human purposes, new, more sophisticated ones now have the power to constrain and twist our lives. So who, of the life form or the object, dominates and controls the other?

At once sinuous and immersive, the scenography by Ker-Xavier — a work in its own right— amplifies this journey through time, which visitors can follow chronologically or go backwards, like a traveller from the future following in the footsteps of his past.