The
Awaiting Scores project focuses on protocol practices in the field of contemporary arts and militant activism. The research program is structured around three areas:

= Artists’ scores as a tool for reinventing our aesthetic categories and artistic practices. Artists’ scores offer new ways of problematizing our relationship to rules and constraints, interpretation and transmission, context and collective coordination. What relationships do artists’ scores invite us to consider between instruction and appropriation, authorship and allography, planning and openness to possibilities?
= The second area concerns the institutional transformations brought about by protocols, particularly from the point of view of their conservation and reactivation. Contemporary art collections are now tasked with protecting the performativity and iterability of living works, sometimes deliberately opposed to any form of heritage preservation. How can their fleeting nature, collective and affective dimension, and above all their embodiment, bring certain archival principles into tension and lead their guardians to reinvent their tools and even their functions?

= Finally, while the study of protocols has so far been confined to the artistic field, we are resolutely opening up the discussion to the political sphere. It is essential today to consider the presence and necessity of protocols in the activist repertoire, particularly from the perspective of art history: how can we combine an understanding of the political urgency that drives their creation (that of feminist mobilizations, the fight against the AIDS epidemic, the subjugation of art to the market) with an understanding of the more general historicity of the protocol phenomenon?

Project history

Awaiting Scores is a research and creation project launched in 2025 and running until 2026, punctuated by various events.

In May 2025, a symposium organized by Franck Apertet (Paris 8 University), Clélia Barbut (Paris 8 University), Philippe Bettinelli (MNAM), Barbara Formis (ACTE Institute, Paris 1 University), Simon Labbé (ACTE Institute, Paris 1 University), Anna Millers (MUCEM), Matthieu Saladin (ACTE Institute, University of Paris 1), and Christophe Viart (ACTE Institute, University of Paris 1) will take place at the MAMCS, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg.
This symposium examines the relationship between so-called protocol-based works and the concept of individual or collective action. By considering the potential for deactivation of artists’ scores and protocols, but also, in return, the fragility of the protocol form and its own risk of deactivation, the aim is to question the possible renewal of our daily relationships with action.

In 2026, a study day is planned on the relationship between protocol and failure; a seminar entitled Protocols and Political Action; and a workshop organized in partnership with cneai =. Throughout the two years, artists’ protocols questioning the relationship between research and institutions will be periodically disseminated through the ArTec newsletter.

Group exhibition for an individual body

A body is cut into distinct parts as in an anatomical study. Each body or part (limb, muscle, or organ) becomes the medium for a coordinated action created by different invited participants. The nature of these actions or gestures will draw inspiration from the history of furtive and fortuitous performances initiated under various authoritarian regimes in Eastern European and South American countries in the last century.
Each participant will devise a gesture or action (simple or complicated) to be performed in a public space crossed by other protagonists and will translate it into a score. Each participant will then activate their own gesture and all those created by the other participants according to a rhythm, a cycle of repetition, and a duration to be agreed upon collectively. The workshop will be led by curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, accompanied by Franck Apertet and Matthieu Saladin. It is part of the Awaiting Scores research program, dedicated to protocol practices in the field of contemporary arts and militant activism. An independent curator and essayist, his latest traveling project on the notions of protocol and performance is La République Cynique, presented at the Palais de Tokyo in November 2024 and currently at the MNS in Warsaw. He has curated monographic exhibitions of Cezary Bodzianowski for the Maura Greco Foundation in Naples, Adrian Paci for the Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana, and Tomislav Gotovac for the MSU in Zagreb. His film based on a performance exhibition at the gb agency gallery in Paris, I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021, was presented in the official selection of the Cinéma du réel festival in 2023. In 2022, he published, as co-curator of documenta: Notes on documenta 14 (The Continuum Was Performed in the Following Manner) (NERO-CAC Geneva).

Partners

The research and creation project Awaiting Scores is supported by EUR ARTEC, UR AIAC Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis, Institut ACTE Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, cneai =, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles.