Since 2025, the Palais de Tokyo has been engaged in a cultural partnership with the city of Corbeil-Essonnes. Located 29 kilometres southeast of Paris, the town is said to have exactly 303 public table tennis tables, earning it the nickname among players of the “City of 300 Tables.”

Table tennis has become the emblem of this partnership: a horizontal game of exchange created with artists, local organisations, and community groups. For the occasion, artist Hugo Béhérégaray repurposed one of his earlier wooden sculptures to create a new work together with members of the AS Corbeil-Essonnes Table Tennis Club. Together, they devised a table that invites players to reinvent the rules and trajectories of the game by sending the ball through the clouds.

In the same spirit of shifting established frameworks, artist and curator Rachael Woodson led an introduction to analogue photography with Le Monde est à Nous, a local association dedicated to photography and travel. Throughout the workshops, photography became a space for experimentation where performance and documentation intertwine. The participants present here a series of portraits of table tennis players from Corbeil-Essonnes, studies of racket grips and playing techniques, and imagined situations unfolding around the tables.

These works enter into dialogue with four photographs by Július Koller (1939–2007), a leading figure of the conceptual avant-garde. Beginning in the 1970s, in a Czechoslovakia shaped by censorship and political control, Koller transformed exhibition spaces into table tennis clubs. This exhibition draws on his idea of art as a space for experience and social interaction, rather than as the production of fixed objects. The works presented here, like this cultural partnership itself, generate unexpected exchanges and trajectories whose rebounds can never be predicted.

The Chamber of echos is a space dedicated to cultural programming and mediation. Located within the Palais de Tokyo’s free admission area, it hosts exhibitions and events of varying scales and durations. Conceived as a flexible and responsive platform, it is inspired by the principles of cultural rights, which affirm every individual and community’s right to participate in cultural life and to express their own culture.

Free admission from the Palais de Tokyo entrance hall.

Project led by artist and cultural mediator Laura Ben Hayoun-Stépanian.

This programme is supported by