« Qu’allons-nous faire, Jorge ? ¿Qué vamos a hacer, Jorge? »

EXHIBITION FROM 15 NOVEMBER 2025 TO 4 JANUARY 2026*
Susana Solano and Jorge Satorre

"Qu’allons-nous faire, Jorge ? ¿ Qué vamos a hacer, Jorge ?" opens, in the form of a question, a new cycle of exhibitions at Frac MÉCA, inviting artists to reflect on works from the collection that are currently rarely seen. For this first instalment, we invited artist Jorge Satorre to take one of Susana Solano's important works out of the Frac storage and to continue, in the Grand Verre space, a conversation that began in 2022.

The work in question, "Pervigiles Popinae" (1986), an imposing sculpture made of welded and bolted sheet metal, somewhere between a fireplace and a monumental cabinet, was acquired by the Frac in 1988, at a time when Susana Solano was garnering a great deal of attention in France. In 1987, she held a series of solo exhibitions at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, at the Galerie des Arènes and the Chapelle des Jésuites in Nîmes. Outside France, she also took part in some major contemporary art events such as Documenta 8, the São Paulo Art Biennial and Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987, or the Venice Biennale in 1988. A metal testimony to the artist's turbulent career, Pervigiles Popinae did the rounds in the early 1990s as part of a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Velázquez Palace of the Reina Sofía National Art Museum in Madrid, which then moved on to the Magasin in Grenoble, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and finally the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden. The 2000s marked the end of the work's journey, except from an appearance in an exhibition at the Forum des Arts et de la Culture in Talence in 2006. Then, followed a long period of dormancy during which it laid horizontally in three crates. Plunged into darkness, it was only interrupted by technical manipulations and internal movements.

When I joined the Frac MÉCA a year ago and visited its storage rooms for the first time, the dormant work exerted a powerful presence. As the reasons for its slumber were unknown, the necessity to take it out and study it became obvious. This involved investigating its history, its materiality and its transformations, its documentation, its possible restoration needs, but also how its perception by the public and the artistic community might have changed. In a nutshell, renewing the dialogue with Susana Solano, and getting to know each other again. In order to accompany and publicly share this experience, which draws on the Frac's technical and scientific expertise, we have invited the artist Jorge Satorre.
The title of this exhibition, which translates as What are we going to do, Jorge?, echoes the "conversation" between the two artists and, more specifically, the voice of Susana Solano. Jorge Satorre's first response to this question was an attempt to overwhelm the space of the Grand Verre by juxtaposing Pervigiles Popinae (1986) with "Perpendiculaire à la Garonne" (1987), another work by Susana Solano produced and acquired by the CAPC during the same period, and recently restored. Both works belong to a family of large-scale pieces made of sheet metal, cut iron and wire mesh. The vertical piece alludes to the world of furniture, in this case monumental and hieratic, while the horizontal piece evokes that of infrastructures – water, energy and the production of raw materials, directly revived here by the liquid, silty, sparkling proximity of the Garonne.

Jorge's second response was to produce a new series of small drawings, discreetly confronting these two oversized sculptures with current events. These pencil-on-paper sketches depict precisely, and not without a certain empathy compassion , a family of silverfish insects living in a kind of hermitage hewn out of a mountain. Silverfish are light-shunning insects, active at night, native to tropical areas but now widespread in our homes, particularly in damp areas. Harmless, they have the peculiarity of digesting cellulose. In other words, they could feed on the very paper on which they are drawn, and as such, are an affliction to libraries, museums and archives. Jorge Satorre draws these insects going about their ordinary domestic lives, eating lunch, chatting, smartphones in hand, hidden from view and from the world, yet at the same time overwhelmed and tormented by images of the violence of that world. And so Jorge Satorre turns the question back on us. What are we going to do?

Elfi Turpin, October 2025.