Chambre des échos : Ping City

With Hugo Béhérégaray, Július Koller and Rachael Woodson with the associations Le Monde Est À Nous and l’AS Corbeil-Essonnes Tennis de Table.

La chambre des échos highlights the cultural twinning between the Palais de Tokyo and the city of Corbeil-Essonnes, showcasing a series of artistic projects developed with local associations around ping-pong.

In Corbeil-Essonnes, whose 303 ping-pong tables have earned it the nickname "city of 300 tables", ping-pong is both a sport and a space for social interaction: it unfolds throughout the city and invites new ways of looking at it.

Photographer Rachael Woodson led an introduction to analogue photography with two associations there — one dedicated to photography, the other to ping-pong.

Here, the image becomes a field of experimentation: a space where rules can be shifted, circumvented, reinvented, and where performance and documentation intertwine.

With this same intention of shifting frameworks, the project enters into dialogue with that of Hugo Béhérégaray, created with the Corbeil-Essonnes table tennis association: a ping-pong table collectively designed as a work to be activated, so as to rethink the rules of this sport.

These proposals resonate with several historical works by Július Koller (1939–2007), who, as early as the 1970s, transformed the exhibition space into a ping-pong club in order to collectively imagine new possible forms of social relations.

In the context of post-Prague Spring, marked by censorship and repression, the playground became for him a model of alternative political experimentation accessible to all.

Whether it's Koller's works or the projects carried out in Corbeil-Essonnes, ping-pong acts as a common thread running through the social fabric. Both a popular practice and a high-level sport, it lies at the boundary of leisure, artistic gesture, and performance.

But above all, it remains what it has never ceased to be: a game. La chambre des Échos La Chambre des échos is a programming space