CAC Brétigny

“The Rostrum”
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team

Elise Courcol-Rozès’s work navigates between theoretical research and shared experimentation. The artist is interested in the mechanisms at play in human interactions. Her work is based on the thought of authors, on everyday observations, and on conversations and reflections about forms of sociability, in order to offer simple forms that call for action.

One of the starting points for Wood Piece (2016-2017) was Marcel Mauss’s notion of gift and counter-gift. According to the anthropologist, in many human societies, a gift must be followed by a counter-gift: the obligation to “give, receive, return” is what places social cohesion on a foundation of exchange reciprocity. Elise also observes commercial gestures in several markets, and explores how the ancestors of our currencies were used. It is with all of this in mind that she asks people who are not necessarily artists (adults who do not know each other, or children from the same class) to put these notions into play. To this end, she creates wooden objects of different shapes, weights and textures. Although these objects spark the desire to manipulate them, and their appearance might evoke everyday things, they have no use outside the possibility of being exchanged. The group is invited to give them, receive them, and maybe return them, for the pleasure of seeing what this does to the group dynamic.

Elise’s research-creation projects examine objects and spaces, exploring what uses they induce. The artist is interested in the way the forms and architectures that surround us influence social relations. Since 2022, she has been running a long-term project called La Tribune (The Rostrum), looking into how courts are perceived by people involved in a trial. Personal accounts collected from defendants, witnesses and victims describe what they feel as they confront the power mechanisms embodied and implemented by the architecture of courts of law. Based on these, Elise creates models with simple materials: a paper arena, a wooden staircase whose risers are missing, a checkered floor evoking a chessboard… all forms illustrating the impressions of people required to speak during a trial.

The artist’s research and co-creation residency continues her investigations into justice, its spaces, and the place that everyone’s voice occupies in legal procedures. During co-creations sessions at the Fleury-Mérogis prison, she offers prisoners the chance to make use of the possibilities of design. The imagination evoked by the term and by the discipline it designates can be redirected to offer a space for creative freedom. By cobbling together salvaged items, they “invent everyday life [together]”, filling the usage gaps in the institutions studied by Michel de Certeau. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1990), he studies how individuals’ everyday behavior constantly thwarts the expectations of those who design our spaces and institutions. Through simple gestures, the artist and participants will attempt to play with the limited possibilities of the prison environment.

Marie Plagnol

Elise Courcol-Rozès (born in 1992) lives and works in Marseille. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, as well as the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her installation, performance and publishing practice is informed by the observation of certain socio-political issues, as well as by research methods in the human sciences. Her work is often rooted in social structures (a prison, a psychiatric hospital, schools) as part of a co-creation approach. She has benefited from support programs and residencies such as Création en Cours (2017), Villa Belleville (2019), Artagon Marseille (2022), and she was awarded the Mécènes du Sud grant in 2022.