Like a few other long-running, forward-looking European arts festivals, Festival d’automne sets the terms for seasons to come. In the last few years, its emphasis has fallen not on the usual conceptual and postmodern suspects, such as Boris Charmatz, Jerome Bel, or Xavier Le Roy, though they are all presenting work, but on France’s former colonies and the city’s immigrant outskirts, the banlieues. This year, the impulse to “center” the margins has reached its logical conclusion: artists have rejected the separation of art from life dominant in the West since the Enlightenment; they are reconstructing the world in which they grew up as the art. For the first of her several Carte Blanche programs, the Zimbabwean Nora Chipaumire reorganizes the Ménagerie de verre—its theater, dance studios, restaurant, and conference rooms—to house Zimbabwean DJs and dance parties, Zimbabwean meals, and much cross-cultural talk. Likewise, Tianzhuo Chen and Siko Setyanto’s performance-installation Ocean Cage stages an Indonesian fishing village’s customary “entanglement among the whale, the fisherman and the ancestor.” The measure of these works’ success, as with all avant-garde work, is that they not placate us—that they not give up their nature to seem less strange to us foreigners. —Apollinaire Scherr