Bien Commun - Julien Viala

“BIEN COMMUN” is french for common good and refers in philosophy, economics and political science to what is shared or achieved by all or most members of a given community. Julien Viala collaborated with John Beeson and Edition Taube and used this term as a starting point.

In an almost unlimited photographical essay he explores how art, cultural artifacts and aesthetics occur in public or semipublic spaces. Together with Jonas Beuchert of Edition Taube he developped a concept to print them on paper, mix them and randomly glue them to long, stack-like objects.

In his essay of the same name––Bien commun––John Beeson tries to figure out what the term means, breaks it apart, searches for its relevance:

“Despite the ‘common knowledge’ that Wikipedia is unreliable, I continually turn to it. It often arrives as the top result when I Google something. (A friend once said that for all Google’s appearance of access to vast sources of information, it’s actually a terrible, inefficient means of conducting ‘real’ research.) So I Googled ‘common good’, and it returned two different and somewhat contradictory Wikipedia entries.”

220 pages, Softcover,
13.4 × 19.5 × 2.5 cm,
Each publication consists of a book-slice of random pages, cut from a stack and wrapped in a poster which holds the essay by John Beeson.