This season, Naomi Beckwith (Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Artistic Director of documenta 16 in Kassel) was given a “carte blanche” to conceive a project unfolding throughout all of the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. Her proposal to work on the reception of  within the American Art scenes over the past decades immediately struck my attention. This proposal is both historically fascinating and deeply contemporary, resonating with current issues and art and beyond.

All throughout the 20th century in France, philosophers, poets and activists challenged disciplines and literary genres, reshaping perspectives on the world. Sometimes even before being known in France, their ideas had been translated in the United States where they became tools for developing a critical vision of both art and society. By challenging social, aesthetic, and linguistic norms, they opened up new ways of seeing and acting. While the notion of “French Theory” was established in the 1990s to describe the enthusiastic reception in the United States of authors such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, other figures—including Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, and Monique Wittig—were equally decisive for the fields of art as well as for cultural, postcolonial, feminist, and gender studies.

It is the story of the circulation of ideas, their resonance and appropriation by several generations of artists across the Atlantic. It is a rich and generous project bringing together more than sixty major and emerging artists, including an extensive retrospective of sculptor Melvin Edwards.

Conceived by Naomi Beckwith together with the Palais de Tokyo team, the project is above all about relationships: relationships between art and thought, between the United States and France, between a foreign curator and a French institution. Relationship also in the sense of relating—of sharing new narratives that we need today. More than the outcome of research, it is an artistic, intellectual and curatorial adventure that chooses to write History rather than merely describe it.