Etienne Chambaud (born in 1980) and Benoît Maire (born in 1978) met in the gardens of the Villa Arson in Nice a few years ago. Their first collaboration was the cycle Libido Post-Fiction in 2002-2003, when they were still students. They then published the text Fears of surface (Hantises de surface) the following year.

A year ago they created Music for a centenary horse. They question the collapse of time through the possible resolution of a mental image, the one associated with "the Turin event" : the moment in 1889 when Nietzsche throws himself on the neck of a beaten horse on a square in the city. In the wake of this play, they imagined their first joint exhibition called The Present. Questions on tears (namely those of dogs), on monuments of monuments, impossible events, local desynchronised time, on the outside, the world's closing, time travel (and how to get back), on nostalgia, melancholy and other disjunctions, on souvenirs of the present and some endings, seem to be the issues.

For the exhibition, they wrote a short fable also called The Present in which they seek to bring to light some motives behind these questions. The Dog, The Old Man and The Child are on the side of a stream that resembles a torrent and are chatting.