CAC Brétigny

In a critical perspective that aims to define participatory and collaborative artistic practices, we will reflect with Marie Fraser upon five fundamental questions, viz., conviviality and consensus vs. antagonism and conflict; the weak visibility coefficient of works that are destined to be erased not only because of their dematerialization, but also because of their “extradisciplinarity” or even withdrawal from the art world; the social and political impact of works based on gestures that tend to blend into everyday life without leaving a trace; the occupation and resistance of these practices facing an increasingly privatized, spectacular and controlled public space; and finally, the risk and failure inherent to collaboration and its unpredictability and to potentially long-term negotiation processes.

Marie Fraser has served as the Professor of contemporary art and museology at the Université du Québec in Montreal since 2007. She was head curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal between 2010 and 2013, and curator of the exhibition put together by the BGL collective for the Canadian Pavilion at the 56^th Venice Biennial in 2015. Since 1997, she has been investigating relational practices and artistic interventions in the public space, contributing to the debate with several articles, exhibition catalogues, debates, talks, supervision of Ph.D. and MA theses, and several exhibitions, including Sur l’expérience de la ville, 1997; Gestes d’artistes, 2001, in collaboration with the Artists’ Space, New York; and La demeure, 2002.

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.