Contemporary art: Mrac Occitanie plays the Calle card

Cultural institutions are regularly invited to play the local card, and thus have the habit of keeping things fair, their own editorial line and the multiple integration factors expected of them. Culture, this unnecessary luxury corrupted by wokism, will at least have the merit of being a tourist-economic relay in the eyes of local authorities.

But this summer, the Mrac de Sérignan is pulling off a double whammy, in a region, Occitanie, which until proven otherwise continues to support the contemporary art museum without fail, but within a department, Hérault, which has cut 100% of its budget dedicated to culture. Upstairs, in its graphic arts studio, where the museum's hits (including Buren's exploded cabin, which designed the museum's facade in 2006) mingle with recent acquisitions, some very beautiful works by Anne-Marie Schneider and a delightful collection by the little-known Côme Mosta-Heirt, it presents a project by Toma Dutter, a local draftsman, sculptor, and walker born in Montpellier in 1981.

The rest of the museum is devoted to a small but solid retrospective of Sophie Calle, a contemporary art star who has helped double the Museum's attendance figures. But also to tick the local artist box. Because if Sophie Calle has never benefited from exhibitions in the region, she is nevertheless from there and lives there part of the year. More precisely in Cailar, not far from Nîmes where her father, Bob Calle, gra