I think current trends started well before the first edition of the Force de l’Art, but something has changed quite radically: There is a new generation of artists who are more international and open minded. If you see the list of artists [in the triennial], many of them are living in Berlin, and some are from China (Wang Du), from Ireland (James Coleman), from Romania (Mircea Cantor), and so on. This was not the case on the French scene 10 years ago.

How did you go about choosing works to be featured in the event?

Since there are three of us who didn’t know each other before — I’d met Jean-Louis Froment only once, 20 years ago, and Jean-Yves Jouannais 10 years ago — we started by each putting forward the artists we’d worked with for a long time. We then decided that every artist had to be approved by all three of us — if just one of us disagreed, the artist was dropped from the list. Once you have this core — let’s say six or seven, no more — you start to make a real exhibition. You then have to build a route through the exhibition, introduce movement, alternate intensity and intimacy. With a huge space like the Grand Palais, you need pieces that work at that scale but also others which require a more intimate, meditative space.

Can you say a little about some of the artworks? Which are your favorites, and why?

For me, what was for a long time the most interesting and perhaps key work in the show is no longer part of the exhibition [though another work by the artist is included]. It was the very first one we chose, a piece by Gilles Barbier called Le Terrier (The Burrow), after the short story by Kafka whose subject is an animal digging labyrinths under the earth, and who is always anxious about the world outside, always thinking there’s a bigger animal than him ready to eat him! At the end of the story you realize that perhaps the animal was actually an artist, or just an ordinary man, and the place where he was digging was his mind.

Barbier’s work is quite emblematic of many of the pieces in the show. Some of them feature evocations of home or of ideal places for making art — some of them literally feature studio spaces — and each one seems threatened by a force that is not clearly identified but could be a danger for art itself. I think the general meaning of the exhibition could in fact be a representation of the situation of art at a particular moment in time.

Do you feel that art is in danger?

I think it is, in a way, because it has never been so loved by society. Every single element of society expects to use art for its own purpose: advertisers, luxury industries.... Any kind of industry is willing to get artists to showcase their products; politicians expect to be able to build their own museums of contemporary art. Everybody is courting artists, and while on the one hand it’s nice for them, it could also be a danger because it’s a restriction on the freedom of the arts.

Do you think art was ever free?

I think it was freer when it was in a kind of opposition to society, in the period we now call the avant-garde, when groups of artists who thought they were in advance announced what the future might be — Futurism and so on.

How can art resist?

By hiding, by having a kind of double role, like the Trojan horse. I think many of the works in the show seem to offer something clean and seductive but in fact have something more complex and disturbing underneath.

Could you say a little about Philippe Rahm’s “white geology”?

We were conscious that you have to provide resistance to the power and strength of the huge space of the Grand Palais — you have to build something in order not to be lost in or destroyed by it — so we decided that architecture should be the solution. But all too often nowadays, architecture restrains the power and the freedom of works of art. We wanted to avoid this. So rather than devising a projection of an ideal space, Philippe Rahm tried to figure out how the power of each work could determine its own habitat, its own burrow, like an animal pushing the wall to build its own space.

An event of this nature, organized under the aegis of a government ministry, inevitably ends up having a certain political aspect to it. In what ways would you say this year’s Force de l’Art might have been influenced by considerations other than the purely artistic?