CAC Brétigny

In light of the recent publication by Éditions Shelter Press/ESAAA of the book In the Canyon, Revise the Canon, Savoir utopique, pédagogie radicale et artist-run community art space en Californie du sud, edited by Géraldine Gourbe, and based on a proposal by Virginie Bobin, we invited Ms. Gourbe to come and present her research. We shall focus in particular on the practices of “consciousness-raising” groups in the framework of feminist movements and on their activist, educational and artistic impact and usage. Eco-feminist activist Starhawk describes the practice as follows, “The group picks a subject… We go around the circle. Each person is given time to speak… We speak from personal experience. When the circle has been completed, we have an open discussion about the common threads and the differences among us. From that discussion, we may develop an analysis” (Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, Beacon Press, 2012).

Géraldine Gourbe is a philosopher and independent researcher. She completed a PhD in esthetics – supported by the DMTS, Ministry of Culture—on the political esthetics of the Womanhouse and the Woman’s Buildings created by Judy Chicago in Los Angeles between 1970 and 1980 at the Université de Nanterre/Paris Grand-Ouest. She taught esthetics at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art de l’Agglomération d’Annecy, at Science Po, at the Beaux-Arts in Marseille and at the Université de Metz. With the support of the Institut français, the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), and the cultural services of the French Embassy in New York, she edited In the Canyon, Revise the Canon: Utopian Knowledge, Radical Pedagogy and Artist-run Community Art Space in Southern California (English version), published by Shelter Press/ESAAA. She is currently working on a study on Allan Kaprow and the American Northwest titled Kaprow, Californien ou l'inservitude volontaire, FAMA series directed by par Xavier Douroux, Presses du réel. She co-directed with Dorothée Dupuis a program and exhibition on the legacy of the writer Kathy Acker titled K. Acker: The Office, Triangle, Marseille. With Florence Ostende, she was awarded a research-curatorship grant to research French counterculture movements between 1947 and 1964 as documented in the Cnap archives. She is associated curator, with Florence Ostende, of the exhibition Ecole(s) de Nice, MAMAC Nice, general curator Hélène Guenin, for the 40^th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, summer 2017.

Co-creation practice modes: orality (seminar)

Organized by Marie Preston and Céline Poulin with the participation of Stéphanie Airaud, this seminar follows the one held last year at Villa Vassilieff. This semester, in view of the two research days scheduled for 21 January at MAC VAL and 4 February at CAC Brétigny, we shall focus on collaborative or co-creative practices that use the dialogical form either in its performative dimension or toward cooperation and the weaving of intersubjective relations.

The dialogue (whether triggered by an activity or not) is understood as a means to initiate a relationship and to elaborate a carefully designed common itinerary, where vocalized language is initially used for its communicative function. Besides the speaker/recipient relationship, we will also consider how each individual going toward the Other perceives the voices that resonate inside him/her. Cooperative creation gives a perceptible form to a state in which we all must juggle with this inner multiplicity. Language, however, is no guarantee that the communication will be flawless. Artists, collectives and people involved in these processes know that the places where we stop lead us to unprecedented encounters where words and gestures must be invented anew. Finally, on the subject of art as experience, we shall examine how oral narratives continue to offer an alternative to the information provided by the media, in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s essay The Storyteller.