CAC Brétigny

Éric Baudelaire will discuss the project he carried out in the percent-for-art program, Dora Maar, début, 2015-2019 at the Dora Maar High School (Saint-Denis / Saint-Ouen, Seine-Saint-Denis). For the occasion, we will be screening “Épisode 1, devenir collégien” (“Episode 1, becoming a high-school student”), the first of the 4 episodes making up this essay film.

“The work is a series of four films (or a film in four episodes) shot with a group of students from Collège Dora Maar during their four years of schooling. The film is like the portrait of a group at a given time and place, a high school in the suburbs of Paris during a transitional time of life. Its subject is its own creation, a collaboration between a film-maker and a group of young students. The film evolves along with the subjects, who gradually turn into auteurs. It draws inspiration from both documentary and fiction in order to explore the idea that the spheres of high school and the cinema have at least one thing in common, the fact that they are laboratories of self-invention. A film essay, a long-distance film, a participatory film whose temporary title is Dora Maar, début, 2015-2019.

“…At the end of the project, in 2019, a definitive version will be produced, and the long form of the film will be freely accessible in public spaces, at school screenings, for example, festivals, and online: it will be an open-access product in no one set medium. To a certain extent the project overturns the conventions of the percent-for-art program: it is not the work that lives in the building, but the school that lives in the work.” (Éric Baudelaire)

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1973, Éric Baudelaire lives and works in Paris. His more recent solo exhibitions were held at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco (2015); the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley (2015); the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany (2014); the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway (2014); Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherché in Paris (2014); the Beirut Art Center in Beirut (2013); Gasworks in London (2012); the contemporary art center La Synagogue in Delme, France (2011); and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2010).

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.