M HKA Ensembles

Sculpture, 4.9 x 17.3 x 17.3 cm .

Collection: Collection Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon.

The force that drives Filliou’s work and thought is Permanent Creation. He helps to establish various Centres of Permanent Creation, such as the Poïpoïdrome and the Smiling Cedilla. As an alternative to the notion of the avant-garde, he proposes the Eternal Network, also known as ‘La fête permanente’.

Excerpt of the conversation between Robert Filliou (RF) and Irmeline Lebeer (IL), Flayosc, France, August 1976.

RF: ‘P’. Now, that should be easy: ‘Poïpoïdrome’. Because we have two fundamental documents about it: the inception of the project, as described in Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, with the whole project of the optimal Poïpoïdrome, and the catalogue of the prototype, which you also have. From those we could take enough material.
            So there should be three entries: the first would be the optimum Poïpoïdrome from 1963, taken directly from Teaching and Learning as Performance Arts. The second would be Poïpoïdrome à espace-temps réel, prototype 00 (Poïpoïdrome in Real Space-Time, Prototype 00) in Brussels in 1975, with some photos. The third would be documentation from Budapest [in 1976]. That’s be interesting, because there it will be Poïpoïdrome à espace-temps réel n^o 1 (Poïpoïdrome in Real Space-Time No.1). It will no longer be the prototype. We have documentation for all these.

IL: Why do you call it optimum?

RF: Yes, we call it ‘optimum’. It means it’s the real one, while the others are in real space-time.