Practical sessions

For the fourth semester of the Académie vivante (Living Academy) pro­gram, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research has invited the research and cre­ation pro­gram directed by Julie Ramage (Paris Diderot University) to take place in Bétonsalon’s spaces from September 2017.

This pro­gram brings together around 30 stu­dents in two working groups at two sites. One is pre­sent on the campus of the Paris Diderot University, while the other is made up of stu­dents who are incar­cer­ated at the Poissy prison (Maison cen­trale de Poissy). The two groups are brought together to col­lab­o­rate from a dis­tance on the real­iza­tion of a research pro­cess and an artistic pro­ject resulting in the pro­duc­tion of a pub­li­ca­tion launched at Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research at the end of the pro­gram.

The 2017-2018 term focuses on archae­ology, a dis­ci­pline exploring the border between the fields of sci­en­tific study and cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties.

In archae­ology we see cur­rent research ques­tioning the rela­tion between archae­ol­o­gists and their object of study. In Theatre/Archaeology, Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks ques­tion the need for archae­ol­o­gists to clean up decom­posing arte­facts; they put for­ward the hypoth­esis of a fear of the mor­tality of the body that archae­ol­o­gists would face when encoun­tering these objects. The pro­ject asks these ques­tions in the con­text of prisons, which are, since the 19th cen­tury, thought of in terms of "con­tam­i­na­tion", "vice", dis­eases, and "rebel­lion". 

The starting point of the pro­ject is to iden­tify objects which for the par­tic­i­pants sig­nify "sick/ness“. By asking how these objects are embedded in cer­tain nar­ra­tive set­tings, by repro­ducing them by using tech­niques of rep­re­sen­ta­tion deployed in archae­o­log­ical prac­tice (such as molding or pho­togram­metry) and studying them in a lab­o­ra­tory, in short, by mixing sci­en­tific anal­ysis with the pro­cess of cre­ation and nar­ra­tion, we create a space of dis­course in which a metaphor­ical account of the living con­di­tions of incar­cer­ated bodies can emerge.