AUBERVILLIERS.- Side Quest is an exhibition by Elouan Le Bars, who graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. Conceived specifically for the Centre d’art Ygrec-ENSAPC, the project originates in a bespoke video game developed from interviews with professional players. In Side Quest, Elouan Le Bars brings together narrative fragments drawn from e-sports with the core mechanisms of game design. He explores how games organise our actions and decisions, and repurposes these logics to expose their underlying assumptions and structural limits.
The exhibition’s title refers to side quests in video games—optional detours that diverge from the main storyline and its objective. Recently popularised on TikTok, the term points to the ways in which video game culture and its codes now permeate everyday life.
One of the central principles of game design is branching narrative paths, which confront players with choices that appear to determine the direction and outcome of the story. This system suggests the possibility of altering the narrative, even of shaping the future. Yet the conditions of these choices are entirely scripted: the illusion of agency arises from predefined paths, embedded in advance within the very architecture of the game.
In Side Quest, this branching structure becomes the game’s underlying framework. The questions posed seem to define the identity and desires of the player, who is guided through a predetermined sequence of rooms, stages, and dreamlike environments.
The voices gathered from e-sports players—their doubts, aspirations, and strategies—resonate throughout the installation, lending it a documentary dimension. By linking these testimonies to video game progression mechanics, Side Quest draws parallels between simulated competition and the imperative to “succeed” in a performance-driven society. Rules, metrics, rankings, rewards: the structures that shape gameplay are also, as McKenzie Wark observes in Gamer Theory (2007), those that increasingly shape our relationship to the world.
Scenographic elements inspired by video games, developed using theatrical set-building techniques, unfold throughout the Centre d’art Ygrec-ENSAPC, revealing its interstitial spaces. The exhibition space itself appears as a set in the making, simultaneously exposing the game and the raw material that underpins it.
Elouan Le Bars (born 1998) is an artist and filmmaker whose practice operates across video, installation, and game design. He graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 2024. His work explores the logics of simulation inherent to digital environments, the speculative and interactive potential of video games, as well as changes and their managerial corollaries in the working world. His films—shot in live action or produced through 3D modelling—are developed from documentary materials (testimonies, interviews, digital artefacts, found objects, etc.). They are often presented within installations in which everyday objects become material vehicles for power dynamics, revealing how these dynamics are organised, replayed, or reshaped within our environments. Through these constant shifts between virtual and material spaces, Elouan Le Bars develops performative modes that operate within a register where the unusual blurs boundaries, creating fictional spaces that heighten our perception of reality.
His work has been presented in the recent solo exhibition Deux vérités, un mensonge in the project room of Frac Île-de-France – Le Plateau (2025), as well as in numerous group exhibitions, including Bullshit Job (2025, Centre Wallonie Bruxelles), Un soleil à peine voilé (2025, Galerie de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts), Musée des Arts et Métiers (2025, Paris), Home is Where the Haunt Is (2025, Kvalitar Gallery, Prague), Biennale de la Jeune Création (2024, Centre d’art La Graineterie, Houilles), La Roue de la Fortune (2024, Tour Orion, Montreuil), Terrestrial Waves (2024, 101 Art & Design Center, Changle, China), Nord-Est, cartographie des résonances (2024, POUSH, Aubervilliers), and Sands of Self (2024, Centre d’art Ygrec-ENSAPC, Aubervilliers). His films have also been shown at festivals including Actoral (2025, Mucem, Marseille), Cinéma du Réel (2025, Paris), Milan Machinima Festival (2025, Italy), Si Cinéma (2024, Caen), Athens Digital Art Festival (2023, Greece), Asolo Art Film Festival (2023, Italy), and FILE Festival – Video Art (2023, São Paulo, Brazil). He was in residence at Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio (2024, Japan) and Villa Dufraine, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Chars (2025, France).
