The Forbidden Conjunction

The Forbidden Conjunction is in a way an introduction to the practice of skateboarding. Using the tools put in place by Roger Caillois in his essay Les Jeux et les Hommes (1958), he sought to describe skateboarding by trying to define its place among the diversity of games and ways of playing. Secondly, he couples the categories of the game. Of the six possible conjunctions, two seem fundamental to him, two would be contingent and two antinomic. That one of the two "prohibited conjunctions" best characterizes skateboarding (and more generally so-called sliding sports) seems to indicate that games and ways of playing, just like artistic practices for that matter, have considerably expanded and become more complex over the past fifty years. In a position that is reminiscent of the interest in popular cultures of artists such as Dan Graham or Robert Smithson, Raphaël Zarka has been documenting and writing about skateboarding for several years: published for the first time in 2003, The Forbidden Conjunction is his first text on the subject. He defines here the specificities of this practice while describing the particular relations that it maintains with the city and certain spaces.