A collective reflection on the multiple dimensions of adolescence in its relationship with art.lab
Why be the object when you can dive into yourself and archive your own adolescence? And what about this adolescence when it lasts until the late thirties, and expands beyond the traditional understanding of age group?
This volume redefines the coming-of-age genre by addressing the contours of the obsession with the prolonged teenager years. Contemporary art views adolescence as a mental state, a condition that has eroded the traditional markers of the passage into adulthood; not a transitory phase but a prolonged mode of being or even a critique of a world that itself refuses to stabilize.
Extramentale, a curatorial platform on teenage aesthetics, was founded by Julia Marchand, the editor of this book, which spans the period from the platform's creation in 2016 through to its eventual closure in 2026. It gave voice to artist-adolescents and author-adolescents, mainly millennials and Gen Zers.
The essays by Julia Marchand and Julie Ackermann examine manifestations of adolescence that draw on gaming, hypersensitivity, and intermediate states of consciousness as a perceptive resource and where contradictory attitudes shape the many dimensions of today's artists-adolescents. Anya Harrison, with her incisive critical voice, explores moral panics and literary extremity in a time when society's fetishization of adolescence continues to generate intense debates. Giulia Mariachiara Galiano, writing from her perspective as a Venice-based curator, traces the limits and contours of the "girl online," reflecting on digital subjectivities staged out by artists of her generation.
Morgan Labar argues that adolescence as the territory of our concerns is no longer the preserve of masculine compulsions of infantile provocations; Labar, author of
In Praise of Dumbness: Regression and Superficiality in the Arts Since the Late 1980s (Les presses du réel), also signs the foreword to this anthology.
Adolescent artists of the Extramentale program and beyond contributed to this publication by sharing their words on the many dimensions of the adolescence: Robin Plus, Gaia Vincensini, Raphaëlle Serre, Linda Voorwinde, Tohé Commaret, Louise Nicolas de Lamballerie, Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel, Kevin Blinderman,
Mohamed Bourouissa, Michal Novotný,
Laura Owens, Magda Szpecht, Thomas Liu Le Lann, Velvet Aubry,
Arnaud Dezoteux, Prune Phi, Alban Diaz, Ant Łakomsk, Liselor Perez, Francesca Grilli, Camille Aleña, Joanna Kordjak, and Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło; interviewed by Venice-based researchers Cecilia Larese, Vittoria Morpurgo, and Julia Marchand.
