PARIS.- This summer, with a season of exhibitions devoted to childhood, Palais de Tokyo is diving into our memories, our dreams and children’s games, while examining how they influence the construction of our identities and their representations.

From one work to the next, from wonder to stupor, Palais de Tokyo is being transformed into a vast pathway deployed via large-scale productions by contemporary craftmen and artists so as to examine the imaginaries of childhood, its foundation myths and its modern transformations, from their archetypes to the norms and conventions that fashion them.

How are the sense of wonder, the capacity to invent worlds, but also childhood fears and anxieties, constructed and become determined, in different contexts?

The exhibition Another banana day for the dream-fish, after the modified title of a story by J.D. Salinger, tries to provide an answer by making us travel from everyday, intimate territories to fantasy worlds, through a series of fragments of an identity in permanent construction.

Like a tale in its principle and construction, with multiple levels of interpretation, addressed at once to children and adults, with its numerous rites of passage, the exhibition invites visitors, “from 7 to 77”, to cross through a variety of initiatory trials, while confronting themselves with the strange and the stranger.

The exhibition, conceived thanks to a partnership with the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller, has been devised in complicity with the artist and filmmaker Clément Cogitore. As the exhibition’s dramaturg, he has imagined a series of rooms, atmospheres and scenes in collaboration with art artisans, invited to be genuine interpreters of the director’s intentions; the materials and their use having been chosen for the emotional power they give off. Through this collaboration, the work of art artisans is thus once again being highlighted, uniting knowhow and creative daring.

This exhibition, conceived with the Japanese curator Kodama Kanazawa and co-organized with the Japan Foundation, is part of Japonismes 2018 , and will be an opportunity for visitors to appreciate the works of a good twenty international artists, six of them being Japanese, and to discover an original collaboration with the mangaka Yûichi Yokoyama.

Curators: Sandra Adam-Couralet and Yoann Gourmel Associated curator: Kodama Kanazawa Dramaturg : Clément Cogitore Scenographer: Laure Pichat