Yvannoé Kruger: Directeur de POUSH

This is not about replaying history—much less claiming it. It’s about recognizing that a certain spirit—defined by movement, porosity, and attentiveness to others—seems, in some places, to return and haunt the walls.

At Poush, we’ve been observing a discreet but revealing phenomenon: artists arriving in Paris, from far away or sometimes quite nearby. Not in response to some strategic imperative, but as if following an instinct. Until recently, the flow had mostly moved in the other direction: to Berlin, London, New York, or other tropical elsewhere. Today, a shift is taking place. Paris is becoming desirable again—not in a spectacular or flashy way, but in a quieter, more organic sense. One feels that the city, with all its rough edges, density, and margins, is once again a place where life and art can be made.

It would probably be presumptuous to compare this moment to that of Montparnasse or the first School of Paris. And yet, similar gestures can be found: artists leaving their hometowns to settle in a cultural capital that may no longer quite be one—but perhaps is becoming one again, in a different way. At Poush, many artists now come from Latin America, Central Europe, North Africa—all continents are represented… but increasingly also from London, Berlin, or New York, which not long ago would have seemed counterintuitive.

These geographic comings and goings tell us something: Paris is once again speaking a plural artistic language. And while this language is not new, it is alive again.

And let’s be honest: Paris no longer stops at the périphérique. This is obvious to artists—but not yet to everyone. Quatre-Chemins, the neighborhood straddling Aubervilliers and Pantin, just five minutes’ walk from the ring road, still feels, to many, like “too far.” A blind spot on Paris’s mental map. And yet it’s where things are being invented.

Like Montparnasse in its day—a neighborhood of studios, transits, poverty, and celebration—these peripheral zones today attract those who must deal with the most immediate constraints: finding space, light, affordable rents, and staying close enough to the center for the art world to still venture out.

Often, it is artists who move in first. Not to beautify or “engage in dialogue,” as is sometimes hastily said, but out of necessity—because these are the few places still accessible, still flexible, still undefined enough to allow both making and breaking.

But it is also often these artists who are capable of opening things up. Of listening. Of weaving ties.

They don’t cross neighborhoods with their heads down or their windows up. They establish their studios in places others flee from; they live there, work there, leave traces.

They are not there to save or impose—but to make. And perhaps, in the act of making, to render these places a little more visible, a little more porous.

They are not urban planners. They are attentive buccaneers. Tightrope walkers, navigating the gap—always between two worlds, between precarity and visibility, between isolation and connection. And sometimes, in that in-between space, something rare occurs: a genuine encounter, a new form, a work that emerges at just the right distance.

Poush, in this context, is neither a manifesto nor a model. It is a space in motion, a collective project with no fixed agenda—a kind of concrete and glass village where each person arrives with their own practice, urgency, and silence. It’s not a collective in the strict sense—it’s a chosen coexistence. An artistic neighborhood. Some cross paths without speaking; others support each other; still others meet and never separate again.

It is anything but uniform. And that’s a good thing.

What connects the artists working there may not be a shared aesthetic, but rather a shared will to anchor their work in the present—an unstable present, marked by conflict, eco-anxiety, identity withdrawal, but also by new desires for alliance, attentiveness, and care.

Their works don’t respond to any school, but they all reflect the same impulse: to make. To make with what they have, with what surrounds them, with who they are.

They are not meant to impress—they are meant to hold. And sometimes, that’s enough.

In the corridors of Poush, in the exhibition spaces, the shared studios, the bright floors and quieter corners, gestures repeat.

You hear the muffled sound of a performance in rehearsal. You pass unfinished works. Words exchanged in passing. Shared silences.

There is mutual help. Doubt voiced out loud. There are exhibitions, too.

Curators, critics, neighbors, and the simply curious are invited in.

It’s a studio life—on a large scale. A kind of artistic territory suspended between wasteland and workshop, between solitude and collective energy.

The dialogue with the artists of the School of Paris proposed by the Hélène Bailly gallery is not a strict comparison, nor a nostalgic rereading. It is a subtle way of revealing soft filiations, unpremeditated resonances.

There is, in this exhibition, something of a quiet conversation. As if, across decades, certain gazes, postures, and even silences were echoing one another.

It’s not about matching the past masters. It’s about looking them in the eye, honestly, and offering them what we’ve become.

The artists of Poush are not trying to join a school. They claim no belonging. But perhaps they do continue a certain lineage: that of places where art is made collectively, in the dust of construction and the friction of the real.

They are artists of the present, working without waiting for recognition, but knowing the importance of their surroundings—of light, of place.

Aubervilliers, in this sense, is not just a setting: it is part of the project. A porous and welcoming city, full of tension and hospitality, that plays its own role in this collective scene.

Poush and the many spaces around it are not utopias. They are real places, with complexity, constraints, fragility.

But perhaps that’s our strength: we don’t promise—we try to make possible. We don’t dictate—we welcome. And sometimes, that’s enough to get something moving.

A contemporary School of Paris, then?

It’s not for us to say.

But perhaps for those who, stepping into this exhibition, will feel what it might mean today to create together in Greater Paris—from its margins, and in spite of everything.