The year 2025 marks CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel’s 30th anniversary, and to open this new program, the curatorial team has imagined an exhibition based on a particular moment in the art center’s history: the year 2003.
2003 is a void in the CAN archives: no trace of an exhibition, no project, no accounts, nothing. Or almost nothing… One of the few remaining references to that year is an article in the March 18, 2004 edition of “Le Courrier” newspaper, announcing the reopening of the art center after a one-year sabbatical. The article noted that “all CAN staff worked on a voluntary basis”; according to the director at the time, Jean-Pierre Huguet, this “explains why we took a break last year…. We were all very tired.” This sudden suspension of all activity due to general exhaustion challenged the current team.
The invitation to artists and curators Caroline Bourrit, Emilie Guenat, Mai-Thu Perret and the Kunsthaus Neverländ team was therefore as much introspective as it was entertaining, the idea being to draw inspiration from this breach in the past to imagine a work, a scenario or a particular approach linked to this past situation.
The exhibition (2003) was constructed as a dialogue between the guests around CAN’s necessarily incomplete archives. This exchange of ideas calls into question the way we conceive our own history, the way we construct our memory and the choices we make today to tell our own story in the future, between what we agree to record for posterity and what we forget or deliberately choose not to tell.
