The Chamber of Echoes invites reflection on what language does to us. It brings together, around a wall-based intervention by Élise Légal combining image and text, authors and researchers who question language as a site of domination but also as a tool for resistance, creation, and poetic and political friction.

Its starting point is a symbolic act: the decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, imposed on maps and U.S. federal institutions. Seemingly absurd, this gesture reveals a broader and well-tested strategy — that of a power seeking to control reality by renaming it for its own ends. Deliberately provocative, this act is part of a larger political agenda: to ban certain terms such as diversity, inclusion, equity, racial justice, intersectionality, and others from public and administrative discourse and programs, in an attempt to erase the social realities they name.

This is precisely the focus of the work of artist and writer Élise Legal, who combines found images, drawing, and poetry to pay close attention to the ways in which language and bodies coexist. Her contribution entitled Cursed takes the form of a mural that brings together a poem and the drawing of a figure borrowed from the pages of the English feminist magazine Spare Rib. Highlighting the interplay between the intimacy of thought and its expression, the singularity of a voice, the physicality of language and its embodiment, the artist explores how we form a collective body through language. “According to Monique Wittig, words are responsible for everything about the individual concerned, down to the shape of their smallest muscle. I want to show that there are languages that harm, that make one ill, that shape bodies by reaching them from within.” Her piece provides the setting for writing and reading workshops held periodically throughout the season.

A space on the cusp of programming and cultural mediation. The Chamber of Echoes is a space on the cusp of programming and cultural mediation. It offers exhibitions and events of varying scale and duration in the free admission area of the Palais de Tokyo. It is designed as a flexible and responsive space, inspired by the logic of cultural rights, a movement that aims to recognise the right of every person or group to participate in cultural life and express their culture.

Free admission from the lobby of the Palais de Tokyo.