In 2007 Liam Gillick presented an exhibition at The Lab Belmar in Lakewood near Denver, Colorado. Titled Weekend in So Show, the exhibition set the stage for a discursive exhibition structure produced with a group of young artists and students from the area. A screening of the Groupe Medvedkine film Week-end à Sochaux (1972) was the prompt for discussion about cultural engagement. The film is a development from the SLON-era productions. It involved participation of workers and activists and rather than a standard documentary includes various staged moments and performances that heighten and expose the relationships of production at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux in Eastern France through re-enactments and satirical performance. In contrast to the SLON films, Week-end à Sochaux clearly marks the arrival of activist theatrics in a modern form. At The Lab, the film was shown on a number of monitors installed side by side on the wall and running out of sync to allow visitors to get a sense of the whole film at the same time.

At the end of the process, a plain large-format book was produced and left behind in the center of simple plywood staging alongside large wall texts. The book spoke. In strong French-accented English, voiced by artist Pierre Bismuth, it invited visitors to “Open the book” to “Read the book” to “Come on – open the book”. The only way to stop the incessant pleading was to open the book. Inside the front cover a text was laid out in a plain san-serif typeface. The written language was not immediately recognisable until read out loud by an English language speaker, revealing it to be phonetic French adapted for a North American accent. Reading the text, the visitor would find themselves performing the role of one of the worker-activist-performers from Week-end à Sochaux, mocking the entreaties and offers from the factory boss to potential workers:

For À bientôt, j’espère…, the front page from the book is presented as a series of wall texts alongside sculptural works. One of the main points of discussion in Denver was the constant deployment of culture as a response to stagnation and misery. Nearly twenty years later, the promise of art as an alternative form of life and resolution to societies of narcissism and boredom remains elusive. But as Gillick has argued in his book Industry and Intelligence, that might well be contemporary art’s endlessly evasive potential.