ÉTAT DES LIEUX
To mark our tenth anniversary in the year 2000 and everyone’s entry into the Third Millennium, we decided to give the Centre of contemporary art an even greater opening. The outcome is a special program called État des lieux, aiming to set up an inventory of the various aspects of current art.

Going against established practice, we decided to invite guest curators and ask them to take stock of what is happening in art now, with a view to describing the present and outlining the future. The project broke down into four events-exhibitions – four inventories – spread out over the entire year.

These État des lieux, events or exhibitions circumscribed in space and time, bring together artists in the broad meaning of the term, who focus on the concerns of the guest curators. Their job is to establish lines of communication between the various forms of thought for which art is the medium. Each of these presentations is a statement by the curator, expressive of his or her convictions.

MESSAGE SALON CARAVAN – ESTHER EPPSTEIN
The heart of the exhibition is the message salon – artistic project thought as a platform of meetings and discoveries. A caravan, symbol of the nomadism is the “container” of this project. The visitor finds here documents, books, publications, music, as well as a video club with more than fifty videos of films and documentary carried out by artists of the area of Zurich.

The message salon invites artists from Zurich to use the space inside and around the caravan for special events which last only the time of one evening. The artists build or prepare their work during the opening hours of the exhibition, but leave the place with their material at the end of the evening.