Following the retrospective exhibition "Pierre Mercier, nothing has ever stopped starting", organized by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg last spring, the LaM will rediscover the Pierre Mercier's work from the angle of the laboratory. Beyond the simple presentation of completed works, this project called "Pierre Mercier, the rules of the game" invites you to look and browse all of the artist's experiments in the manner of a permanent work in progress with notes, preparatory documents or drawings never exposed to reactivated projects on this occasion. 

In addition to a hanging that will evolve over time, a meeting in the framework of Cité-Philo and a day of studies, conferences and performances, will allow dialogue between philosophers, writers, art historians and artists around the question of the game and its rules in the work of artist and teacher of Pierre Mercier, as wall as the apprehension of the work through all of its components. 

This meeting will also be an opportuntiy to rethink the monumental sculpture. "The Thought of the Wise" is a perpetual banquet dated of 1991 (coll. LaM) in a digital form and to question more widely the archive and transmission of performing arts suuch as "La Promenade obscure", dated of 2015. Pierre Mercier, through his involvement in the field of photography, sculpture, film and performance, had in mind to entrust an essential place to the viewer, espacially in his attention to the point of view. It seems therefore possible to envisage the reactivation of some of its projects in interpretative forms, and to redefine the status of a work of art according to the rules of the game.