CAC Brétigny

“3 + 3 Make Imagery”
Curators: The CAC Brétigny team

Marine Zonca defines herself as a sculptor and researcher. She links these two disciplines to produce volumetric pieces that mix the human sciences with plastic techniques. She says that her works “explore the union of body and mind”. The artist involves her body by choosing techniques that require engagement, such as lime fresco, wool felting and stone carving. She often links these forms to notions drawn from her research in anthropology. In 2023, she created a series of carved-stone cubes on which she painted words from philosophy courses given by Gilles Deleuze, bringing together decorative arts techniques, geometric forms, and cognitive science. Her sculptures cultivate antagonisms: those who observe them navigate between intellect and sensitivity.

Marine links her plastic work to her research at the EHESS on the history of mnemonics. This notion groups all processes facilitating the memorization of knowledge. It is a matter of mentally associating knowledge with images, objects, or narratives. A good example is the famous “Mais où est donc Ornicar?”, a key mnemonic aid for remembering conjunctions in French grammar lessons. This way of learning, widely used in schools until the late 19^th century, suddenly disappeared from school curriculums. In her recent works, the artist explores these questions: “Why have mnemonics lost their place in schools? Would it be because they are too artistic?”.

For the “Bascules” season, the art center is inviting Marine for a research and co-creation residency. For “3 + 3 Make Imagery”, she is summoning the imagination and humor of students from the Les Coquelicots elementary school in Bruyères-le-Châtel and the Louis Pasteur elementary school in La Norville around mnemonics. The project offered by the artist is an opportunity to reenact the meeting between art and knowledge through practices that summon sensory knowledge and Cartesian understanding, fantasy and seriousness. Coming together in class to explore their school curriculum, the students will be asked to transcribe, code, decorate, annotate, encrypt, deform and model the content of their courses by plastic, poetic and editorial means.

Through Marine’s projects revolving around mnemonics, we experiment with unconventional learning methods that involve the memorization of universal knowledge by means of the perceptible. The educational objects that the artist invents in collaboration with students are attempts to dismantle the hierarchies in modes of knowledge transmission, at school and elsewhere.

Milène Denécheau

Marine Zonca (born in 1993) lives and works in Paris. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. Her practice combines sculpture, drawing, and animation, as well as historically situated techniques like fresco, to produce anachronisms. At the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, she conducts research into 19^th century mnemonic practices. Her work has appeared in several exhibitions, including at KOMMET in Lyon (2020), DOC! in Paris (2020), La Serre in Saint-Etienne (2022) and La Tôlerie in Clermont-Ferrand (2023).

The residency “3 + 3 make a picture” by Marine Zonca benefits from the support of the Direction régionale des Affaires culturelles d'Île-de-France—Ministère de la Culture.