Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, forms part of the initiative whereby an artist is invited each year to design an exhibition that will encourage visitors to the Centre for Contemporary Art to touch and interact with the works.

Sophie Cure is an artist, graphic designer and typographer. She sees language as a living thing to play with. Her adaptable objects spark pleasure in reading, deciphering, understanding, looking at everyday things in a new way. She includes elections for the word of the day, a Scrabble® tray with changeable letters, ideas in black to colour in, and reading sonatas. Her creations almost always involve a game. For Sophie Cure, this motivates the creative urge, it’s a state of mind, a tool that favours sharing and learning, allowing the unexpected to emerge.

In this exhibition she invites us to plunge into an immersive landscape with multiple meanings. It’s a protected area where words are raised on high, cherished, welcomed, stripped bare, and listened to with curiosity. It’s then up to us to play with the ebb and flow of the language, to dive into the long words, to wander freely, chatter away, sail close to the wind or allow ourselves to be carried along on the drift.

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie rings out like a magic spell to help us read in the flames. It’s the starting point of a journey to deploy, hide, shift and compose, to reveal the musicality, the intimate and political power of the letters, syllables and words that make up this exhibition. It’s also the special mission entrusted to us by the artist: to play.

For example, the Bureau for Lexical Affairs proposes to rehabilitate words long since disappeared or revive those worn out in obfuscating waffle, to invent new words to fill lexical gaps, to welcome xords in exile and to send hated words packing, as far away as possible.

In a world in crisis, the preservation of language would seem to be a necessity. When some people attempt to confiscate it to use as an instrument of oppression and domination, let’s raise the flag for a free, living language. An irreverent language. A sensitive language, “a language of asylum, an anti-missile language, a language that is futile, reptile, fertile.”[1]

The Passerelle exhibition brings together a body of work produced by Sophie Cure and presented in 2021 at the Bel Ordinaire in Pau. It is further enhanced by new productions suggested by the local maritime context, the architecture of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Brest and current politics. Echoing this presentation, another delegation from the Bureau for Lexical Affairs, led by Mathilde Chéreau, has been installed since April in Place Napoléon III at Bellevue in Brest, where it will stay until the end of October 2025. This friendly and welcoming space invites local people to vote for the word of the day and take part in various graphic and typographic experiments