Parties Prenantes

Parties Prenantes 1, presentation, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2009

Arte de Conducta, La Havana, Cuba - Tania Bruguera
Art and Social Practice, Portland, USA - Jennifer Delos Reyes & Harrell Fletcher
Ecole des Arts Politiques, Sciences Po Paris - Bruno Latour & Valérie Pihet

with stu­dents and teachers from:
Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7
ENSA Paris-Val de Seine
Ecole Publique de Paris, Bétonsalon
ENSA Paris Cergy
ENSBA Paris
La Forme des Idées (ENBA Lyon & ENSA Nice)...

A pro­posal of Mélanie Bouteloup (Bétonsalon), Julien Lanchet & Sara Martinetti (stu­dents at Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7)

Parties Prenantes (Interested Parties) are the actors (indi­vidual or col­lec­tive) who are con­cerned by a pro­ject; they weave net­works of rela­tions based on their mutual inter­de­pen­dence. A stu­dent, a teacher, uni­ver­sity staff, an artist, an inhab­i­tant, a child, a passer-by, a shop­keeper, an employee or a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion could con­sti­tute one pos­sible flowchart of the dis­trict ZAC Massena Paris Rive Gauche (‘Concerted Building Zone’, 13th arrondisse­ment). The exhi­bi­tion pro­ject Parties Prenantes invites these actors to join and inter­twine their reading of the con­text, thus cre­ating a more com­plex rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this urban­istic space. This con­cept of rep­re­sen­ta­tion - to be under­stood as ren­dering pro­cesses vis­ible through signs, images, texts, or maps - will be approached by linking fields that are often dis­con­nected, such as the sciences, pol­i­tics and art.

How can an art center artic­u­late, within a pro­ject, research, cre­ation, and ped­a­gogy with the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the con­text? What role can rep­re­sen­ta­tion play in the under­standing and the trans­for­ma­tion of a neigh­bour­hood? How to create a pro­ject that can “be par­tic­i­pated”, which is notion­ally a space of inter­pre­ta­tion? These are all ques­tions that the par­tic­i­pants of Parties Prenantes will reflect upon, by devel­oping such forms and prac­tices as they deem appro­priate, arising from agree­ment, com­pro­mise or con­flict.

Parties Prenantes is a pro­ject about col­lec­tive prac­tices of pro­duc­tion and knowl­edge trans­mis­sion, using the models of ped­a­gogy and orality. Bétonsalon invites schools to engage, train, develop dif­ferent pro­jects with the dis­trict users. Their speci­ficity is to develop a con­tex­tu­al­ized artistic prac­tice, less cen­tered on the pro­duc­tion of objects than on the pro­cess of col­lab­o­ra­tion. The “Cát­edra Arte de Conducta” is a school ded­i­cated to the study of per­for­ma­tive behaviour and polit­ical art, founded in La Havana (Cuba) by the artist Tania Bruguera. It ques­tions the limits of the artistic field in his­tor­ical and ide­o­log­ical con­di­tions and pro­poses the imple­men­ta­tion of the social use­ful­ness of art. “Art and Social Practice” is a Master’s pro­gramme at Portland State University (Oregon, USA), founded by artist Harrell Fletcher. It encour­ages stu­dents to develop their artistic prac­tice within society, by using methods from soci­ology, anthro­pology and jour­nalism. The “School of Political Arts” of Sciences Po, founded by Bruno Latour (opening sched­uled for September 2010), will con­verge social sciences, human­i­ties and arts in an inno­va­tive set of teaching and learning expe­ri­ences focused on a common object, the public space. The University Paris Diderot - Paris 7, the Paris-Val de Seine archi­tec­ture school, the Public School of Paris, the Paris Cergy (ENSA) and Paris (ENSBA) schools of Fine Arts, ‘La Forme des Idées’ (ENBA Lyon and ENSA Nice) will also work with the inter­ested par­ties of the dis­trict.

Mélanie Bouteloup, Julien Lanchet, Sara Martinetti.

Parties Prenantes 3, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010

Format

Parties Prenantes is an exhi­bi­tion open to the public that pre­sents itself in dif­ferent forms: work­shops, lec­tures, debates, pic­nics, a radio, a library, a cat­alog ... The space of Bétonsalon is trans­formed into a working space : maps of the area, tables, com­puters, cafe­teria and a library.

As part of the recon­sid­er­a­tion of tra­di­tional forms of pre­sen­ta­tion (con­ducted over espe­cially during the last ten years by many artists, fol­lowed by cura­tors and direc­tors of the insti­tu­tion), the exhi­bi­tion takes mul­tiple forms not nec­es­sarily linked to the pre­sen­ta­tion of works of art. For instance, we can quote exhi­bi­tions “Places with a past” and “Cul­ture in action” orga­nized by Mary Jane Jacob in 1991 and in 1992-1993 in Chicago, in which the invited artists were intro­duced into com­mu­ni­ties to work on social pro­jects. In Paris, the expe­ri­ence of “So­ciété Anonyme” exhi­bi­tion in Plateau / Frac Ile-de-France in 2008, where artists, col­lec­tives and struc­tures from dif­ferent cities of the world, tem­po­ralily relo­cated their activ­i­ties in Paris to think up new pro­jects in col­lab­o­ra­tion with artists, sci­en­tists, or intel­lec­tuals from Paris. A pro­gram of public events (in the form of lec­tures, screen­ings, activ­i­ties, per­for­mances, sem­i­nars, work­shops, din­ners, con­certs, par­ties, etc..) then allowed to follow the pro­gress of their work. These exhi­bi­tions have in common to con­sider the role of the curator as the one that invites artists or col­lec­tives to work from a back­ground in direct col­lab­o­ra­tion with the resources avail­able in order to develop tools for crit­ical thinking and action in this world.

Each res­i­dency will begin with a series of ‘meeting days’ in order to intro­duce par­tic­i­pants and artists to one another, and to pre­sent issues related to the con­text through lec­tures, guided tours and debates. Each pro­ject, col­lec­tively deter­mined, might take on var­ious forms of exis­tence: objects, pho­tographs, videos, radio broad­casts, actions, classes, enquiries... The pro­duc­tion pro­cess and the works pro­duced will be exhib­ited in Bétonsalon’s space, then doc­u­mented in a cat­a­logue to be pub­lished after the pro­ject.

Students, teachers, uni­ver­sity staffs, artists, inhab­i­tants, chil­dren, passers-by, shop­keepers, employees are invited to par­tic­i­pate in ‘Parties Prenantes’. Interested people need to come to the meeting days.
Participation can take three dif­ferent forms :
- A core group will be con­sti­tuted by a stu­dents from the dif­ferent schools.
- Small groups will par­tic­i­pate for a day or an after­noon, in order to do a work­shop or a class.
- Visitors will interact when they enter the space

Download the press release (only in French)