Les commissaires anonymes

SANITATION - Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Mathilde — 2018-11-18T09:54:00Z

The American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles spent 38 years “in residency” in the sanitation services of New York City. Back on his career and on what she intitled “the art of maintenance”.


an illustration by Elodie Lascar

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

The Grignyotheque

Mathilde — 2018-02-24T18:40:55Z

International workshop of urban planning in Cergy-Pontoise, 2017

TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE CITY
Drivers of social values and wealth creation

What are Les ateliers?

A non profit- organization since 1982, Les Ateliers – International workshops of planning and urban design – aims to develop the collective creation of ideas that tackle the challenges and processes of everyday city planning and design. by promoting a process of collective and multidisciplinary work that produces innovative and illustrative proposals relating to urban design and spatial development.

The Grignyotheque

Les commissaires anonymes had been invited to callaborate to the collective workshops of september around the notion of the “inclusive city” with the artist Boris Achour, as associated artists. At the end of the three weeks session, they published in the synthesis document a communication: The Grygnyothèque.

Synthesis document available HERE.

The contribution les commissaires anonymes is a critical point of view on the notion of “inclusive city” and a fictive proposal for an infrastructure of languages prototypes, inspired by the meetings with city representatives and the inhabitants of Grigny in a southwestern suburb of Paris.

Autonomous Actors Factory

2017-08-26T23:11:00Z

Meeting with Daria Lippi, stage director and actor, Barbara Forestier, communication agency manager, and Juliette Salmon, actor and musician, are the founders and kingpins of the Fabrique Autonome des Acteurs (Autonomous Actors Factory) in Bataville.
From May to October, they move into the canteen building and invite artists, actors and researchers to play with the deserted setting of the former factory. No longer about Mr Bata and a big boss, guru methodology, this factory replaces Daddy with a peer-to-peer pedagogy.

- we write

The disoriented cabaret

2017-08-25T22:31:00Z

The disoriented cabaret, graphic and textual script from a cabaret-performance written and composed by Gabriel Mattei and Mathilde Sauzet

The edition, designed by Sophie Cure, is printed out in a newspaper-like format and is both an opera libretto composed by dialogues and songs, and a prop for the performance. Holding it open during the action the spectators become a collective character: The generic crowd.

English version only.
Limited edition : 100 copies by performance, distributed within the limits of available stock.

to order the newspaper :

L'ile des réunions

2016-06-25T23:40:00Z

L'ILE DES REUNIONS, a methodology of collaborative meetings for an affirmative approach of uncertainty
The book L'île des réunions (The island of meetings) gathers together ten narratives and analysis of artistic and social situations that happened during the European Capital of Culture in Mons in 2015. These situations, spontaneous and experimental, emphasize the precious and too often, much neglected potential in the act of reunion. Why do we gather? What is the aim of a meeting?

Extract from the introduction text:

The meetings are planned to forecast, to operate and to program and yet you still say that they are a waste of time, that you didn't need to be there, that you don't see the point of it … L'île des réunions is situated away from the continent of productivity. It's a zone of isolation to re-learn how to politically orient collaborative processes, rather than to project mediocre and predictable final goals. L'île des réunions is an insular moment, an opportunity to take distance from the reasons and the means of intellectual and functional emancipation.
This method aims to learn again how to gather around abstract issues such as the use of time, working models, the role of ethics, the perception of complexity on a global scale, the instability of values and to understand collectively how to link such concerns to organizational structures.
Ten contingent situations constitute the book as elements of reference to an approach, and the number of reunions is infinite. For each situation the method suggests two components necessary to each other: an operational framework and a zone of uncertainty. The operational framework is a support structure of organizational meeting following certain qualities for hosting, tools and activities. The uncertainty zone is made up of elements of measurement orientated toward political and sensible gestures but those that one cannot know before experimentation happens, the final benefits and forms.
The book is composed from lived experience of situations during 2015 in Mons; each are associated to a graphic translation into methodology. An interview with Gregoire Sérikoff, strategic designer and collaborative processes facilitator for institutions and companies is proposed in light of the artistic and poetical approach to methodology of L'île des réunions.

The principle of L'île des réunions :

▶ L'île des réunions is a space of gathering at the same time fictive and real.
▶ L'île des réunions has been drawn, built and used by artistic practices.
▶ L'île des réunions is a methodological tool composed by an visible and an invisible architecture: an “operational frame” and a “zone of uncertainty”.
▶ L'île des réunions is a socio-professional ritual, a hijack of institutionalized working forms, an organizational system to compose.
▶ L'île des réunions is a hypothesis.
▶ L'île des réunions is a commons, when the distinction between public and private space disappears.
▶ L'île des réunions is a curatorial research project around collaborative modes of work conducive to new forms of collective subjectivity.
▶ L'île des réunions is a political attempt for a « geo-social artistry and cunning rationality*. »
*Accelerationist manifesto, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, 14 May 2013

Graphic design by the studio Ultragramme, printed on Rizo machines et handmade by the Atelier Papier Machine.

To order the book, contact us at lescommissairesanonymes gmail.com (price 12€)

Minute Editions

2016-06-11T23:39:00Z

A process of live documentation and archive design in collaboration with
Frédéric d'Incau. In response to the need for collecting, archiving and sharing references and feedback in the short term and with an economy of means, Minutes Editions is a tool-display of collaborative work.

Composed of a production unit (layout, print and stockage), a table to realize booklets and exhibition boards of content (texts and images), the display is designed to function as a complement to a collective working session. It allows the user to edit content during exchanges and works, to lay it out on independant pages, to print it on format sets and then to present all the prints on the boards. Throughout the day, the participants can also contribute with their own images and texts. At the end of the session, people can choose a selection of pages and assemble them into a book following a small set of rules.

One or two persons can be in charge of the Minute editions; they are free to play with the modes of representations and aesthetics.. The prints are mainly in black and white. Minute Editions integrates a wide range of paper qualities and colors and a specific means of binding.

To know more about the disposal and the activation of the Minute Editions, contact us at : lescommissairesanonymes gmail.com

Where are we? inland

2016-05-21T23:37:00Z

Institut Casco
Dutch Art Institute

A contribution from Mathilde Sauzet Mattei for the collected volume INLAND, an inquiry into the existence of cultural, artistic and agricultural practices, and the relationship between rural and urban spaces edited by the artist Fernando Garcia-Dory at the Dutch Art Institute in 2015.

Introduction of Where are we?

The farm of La Mhotte is an informal and experimental institution located in a rural area in Auvergne, France. It is run by a group of people who live and/or work on the site on notions of autonomy and commons, through new approaches towards agriculture, horseback riding, cultural programming, tourism, currency, publishing, local food distribution, property, etc. Bureau d'Etudes, a duo comprised of artists Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt, decided to settle in this farm six years ago to develop their artistic practice (for which they mainly use cartography) with the aim of rooting itself in a specific locality and creating local anchorage.

This research aims to understand how La Mhotte contributes to the production of cultural resources and social imaginary for new societal models. I would like to bring out the role of art in the structuring of abstract values such as language, knowledge and empowerment.

This folder presents three moments of a research on the farm of La Mhotte: the first is an interview conducted two years ago in order to document the project, the second a recent Skype discussion with Xavier, following their proposition for Les commissaires anonymes to move to the farm to work on a professional collaboration; lastly, a diary written during a one-week residency we undertook at La Mhotte in the beginning of April 2015. Gabriel Mattei, the husband of Mathilde, conductor and musician, was progressively associated with this research.

— -

The complete volume is a collection of case studies classified in six chapters:
– Industrial Capitalist Earth Model
– Reinventing the vernacular / Eco-feminism & neo-indigenism
– Worlding / Worldviews
– Making it Happen - Hands at work
– Test fields of practice
– INLAND

“ INLAND is a project that examines the role of territories, geopolitics, culture and identity in the relationship between the city and the countryside today. It´s aim is to introduce the possibility of contemporary art practice in relation to the rural, and how that context might modify the way art happens and circulates." Fernando Garcia Dory

Reed more about Inland here.

Small victories

2015-11-14T23:52:00Z

Article on the Jakarta Biennale
A month ago, I was visiting the Lyon Biennale and I was pissed at such a flatness. No necessity for existence, no necessity for art appeared in the large display of monuments and entertaining artworks. The event the modern life - title of the exhibition - left me sad in front of a dead modern monster that one had no decency to market the carcass of. On the contrary, in the big exhibition hall of the Jakarta Biennale, something urges and struggles…
- we write

ELDORADO MAXIMUM

2015-06-20T23:36:00Z

Fifteen artistic stories and initiatives that transform our representations of elsewhere, money and future
Following the exhibition ELDORADO MAXIMUM, Les commissaires anonymes extended their research into artistic representations and the formulation of fantasy projections of a better future.Thanks to the grant of the Christophe Merian Foundation/Atelier Mondial (Basel), they spent a long term residency in Brussels for the writing of this first self-published book : Eldorado Maximum, a new typology of contemporary eldorados.

Extracts of the prologue:

10.09.2014

In 2014, Les commissaires anonymes move and set up house in Brussels. The Schengen borders are wide open; we just need a truck and the motivation to make of this place what we will soon call ‘home'. We are far from being the first French immigrants in Belgium. During the last few years, a number of artists, as well as the independently wealthy, have made the choice to move; for some they think that they will find in Brussels more liberty to create, and for others the move is with the wish to escape newly imposed taxes. Is the Belgium capital becoming a type of eldorado?

These simultaneous migrations of two very different social groups, with the same destination, were a starting point for this task to redefine the myth of the golden future: What ideas of the beyond motivate these groups to leave what one has already? What projections of the future lead such departures? What attractions prompt people to want to change cities or even countries?
Cecile Roche Boutin and myself have left France, Paris and Strasbourg respectively, for the practical reasons of escaping high rent and low paying jobs. But those weren't our only reasons. If gold is the symbol of eldorado, we could make the hypothesis that it was never the one and only drive in the quest for a better future. Capitalism has appropriated from this legend as a founding portrayal of itself, preserving only the spectacular image of untold wealth, riches and easy pleasures. “Dubai, the new eldorado for collectors”, says a headline from Le Monde newspaper on March 23rd 2013, or “Nigeria, the new eldorado for Champagne” calls out the L'Union, the local paper for the Ardennes in May 2013. Having no personal capital to invest and grow ourselves, we are not able to identify with headlines such as these, which most ostensibly have been written to pique the interest of those with higher income. Since Les commissaires anonymes search a different type of wealth, the myth's very definition separates us from our fellow fiscal neighbours in paradise. (...)

12.09.2014

A beach riddled with coconuts trees, on the other side of a walled border, or an alternative model of society: what would we not do to get there? The image of eldorado creates adrenaline; she manifests herself within each individual who's on the quest for change. Today our work as curators allows us to meet artists and other cultural players who possess such drive, and to thus enter into their stories and share with them in their adventures. The idealism, poetry and engagement of their initiatives doesn't supply the type of gold necessary to solve the dysfunctions of the global economy, but the quest that drives them is an invitation to refresh our own worn down representations of that something better found elsewhere, from money and the future in favour of new models for living. (...)

15.09.2013

The quest for eldorado is also a tragic story. The appeal of gold will have led many souls full of illusions for a better future to their final end. This quest represents an appetite for gain and the lure for property that motivates capitalism. But what matters to us today, is the intent of these abstract and immediate territories on which our desire for transformation is built. Eldorado must remain a precarious space, without the promises of security, frontier, or absolutes for real wealth. (...)

21.09.2013

“We shouldn't be afraid of austerity, but rather embrace it. Through austerity, we encounter resignation. But through austerity, we also meet each other.“ In the video The Beauty of Austerity 26,artists Guido Giglio and Hannes Bernard question the term of austerity, which has kept on conditioning western society into adopting a submissive and restrictive attitude. Respectively born in Brazil and South-Africa, these two artists warn us about the ambiguity of this western concept that mortifies bodies and souls to the benefit of capitalist economy. Their work proposes that we consider a creative and emancipating sobriety. So that the quest for a contemporary eldorado should remain a posture of resistance against disenchantment, an opposition tactic to fight moroseness,
so as to generate multiple desires to transform the world. (...)

With the artworks of:
Albertine Meunier, Alain della Negra & Kaori Kinoshita, Bureau d'études , Etienne Boulanger, le collectif Exyzt, Grégoire Motte, Guillaume Barth, Hannes Bernard & Guido Giglio, Hôtel Charleroi, Jean-Charles Massera, Joseph Popper, Léo Delafontaine, Le Parti Poétique, Ne pas plier, the collective Saint Machine.

Graphic design by the studio Ultragramme, printed on Rizo machines et handmade by the Atelier Papier Machine.

This book has been realized with the support of the Atelier Mondial of the Fondation Christophe Merian (Basel), the grant of alumni of the HEAR (Strasbourg) and the grant of Alsace Region.

To order the book, contact us by email to lescommissairesanonymes gmail.com (price 14€)

Would art be an evidence of a life fully lived?*

2014-11-08T23:48:00Z

To get the book in french here

* Original title: L'art est-il la preuve d'une vie pleinement vécue.
Extract of the artwork of Scott King.

Interviews with:
Jean-Christophe Royoux (Drac Centre), Lucy Hoffbauer et Gilles Rion (Frac Centre), Hilde Teerlinck (Frac Nord-Pas-De-Calais), Katia Gagnard (Frac Alsace), Bernard Goy (Drac Alsace)

Les commissaires anonymes

SANITATION - Mierle Laderman Ukeles

The Grignyotheque

What are Les ateliers?

The Grignyotheque

Autonomous Actors Factory

The disoriented cabaret

L'ile des réunions

The principle of L'île des réunions :

Minute Editions

Where are we? inland

Introduction of Where are we?

Reed more about Inland here.

Small victories

ELDORADO MAXIMUM

10.09.2014

12.09.2014

15.09.2013

21.09.2013

Would art be an evidence of a life fully lived?*

To get the book in french here