Les commissaires anonymes

We are blocks of flats*

2016-06-03T16:21:00Z

*original title: Nous sommes des immeubles

This three day workshop proposed a moment of reflection, experimentation and co-construction around the social potential of architecture and its way to generate humanity. What does the city look like if we let our thoughts be visible, our stories, our knowledge, our conflicts, our ideals, our fights?

“We are blocks of flats with lodgers who we don't know anything about…”

An extract of the collective writing session around a text “Nous sommes des immeubles” (we are buildings) by the author Wajdi Mouawad, which was set, on the last day, in a performance reading presented at the opening of the public show :

WE ARE BLOCKS OF FLATS
… because we are cold
… because we are made of bricks, wood, steel and concrete.
… because we are tall.
… because we are making light in the dark street.
… situated in the country “diversified”.
… where there are bosses living without family life.
… which in the dark have no fear.
… who look like giants.
… which look like new technologies.
… because the floors of these buildings represent our layers of spirit and their height is measurable to our humanity.
… in the country of the folly.
… because I could be a big kitchen.
… who look like empty shells without feelings
… where robots, machines and mechanisms are living
… in the land of the soul.
… in the land of clouds and rain.
… because we host beings.
… in the country of the mad hatter.
… because we have several facades.
… because I am solid.

55 curators for the first time

2016-05-20T16:19:00Z

F93
departmental collection of contemporary art of Seine Saint Denis
6th class (11 years old) from the college Jacques Prévert in Noisy le Sec
5th class SEGPA (12 years old) from the college Lavoisier in Pantin

What is an art exhibition? What does a curator curate?

Eight sessions of work in class to introduce to the students the practice of a curator and the departmental collection of Seine Saint Denis.
The workshops lead the students to conceive of an exhibition at the 116 Art Center of Montreuil. Each class selected nine artworks amongst the two thousand of the collection from the protocol of the alphabet letter. Each letter was associated to a keyword allowing them to comment on one work. The outcome was a visually and semantically heteroclite, rich in multiple cultural references and the spontaneous approach to art by these fifty-five young curators.

The garden shed

2015-11-07T17:16:00Z

Workshop organized in collaboration with Martha Jager and Jammie Nicholas
Dutch Art Institute

The garden shed is an instance of discussions about in-process artistic research in the context of the collaborative study format of the Dutch Art Institute. During the monthly week of courses, lectures and workshops that the forty artists and students, share.The garden shed intervenes in the program and opens up an intimate space for attempts and critical exchanges between students.

“For our will to share and show research to one another, our need to feel more confident to take risks, for what is at stake in the lecture-performance format, the training of voice and body attitudes on stage and… and a desire to break free, The Garden Shed is open!”

Relevant to the model of the famous DAI presentation moment “The Kitchen / Not the Restaurant”, “The Garden Shed not the Workshop” is a particular working space based on intimacy and criticality, organized only for and by the students. In groups of five, each participant shares a material, an experimentation of a format, an exercise of discourse, a performance draft of 7 to 10 min and the rest of the group directly discusses and reacts to the proposal for 15/20 min.

The invisible city, to find ways to stay elusive

2014-11-23T17:15:00Z

In collaboration with the collective ConstructLab
University of architecture and urbanism of Mons

In the context of its intervention for the European Capitale of Culture 2015, le collective ConstructLab proposed a moment of sharing and prospection at the architecture school of Mons. The workshop tackled the design of a living space at the “suspended garden”, a grove of wild cherry trees on the rooftop of the former military bakery of the city. The aim of the week was for ConstructLab to share with the students a vision of conception and the construction of urban spaces based on the specificities of a social context and all the history associated with it.

Let's start from the hypothesis that architecture is a social matter. We always talk about “people”, and “inhabitants” but who are these persons really or what is it that they desire? The task was to invent one character as a small group and then to plan for all of them a micro-city at the scale of the garden. How do we negotiate to make space?
At the end of the week, the students performed with live forms and models the characters, their ways of living and a pavilion that they designed for them. The potential inhabitants were: a blind man, a chameleon, an aboriginal tribesman, a hip hop artist, a robot, a man-pen, the icon of Mons, a homeless man who lives only in the air on electrical lines, the ghost of a former Dutch soldier, the Rodin thinker, a man running against time ...

In his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour explains that “there is no common world, it has to be perpetually composed”. The workshop was an attempt to envisage the task of architecture in this composition of the common world.

To breath in urban spaces

2014-06-22T16:13:00Z

In collaboration with Passage Management (consultancy agency in management of innovation)
i-LAB Air Liquide

In their think-tank on innovation called I-Lab, the company Air Liquide opens a program of renewal of working methodologies and management of projects. Thirty collaborators from various jobs met to think about the sanitary, ecological and economic issues central to the presence of oxygen in urban spaces. Les commissaires anonymes were invited by the consultancy agency Passage Management to lead one of their three half-days of workshops of analysis of contexts, critical problematizations, definitions of use scenarios and speeches.

Exercise 1:

YES/NO

To understand the composition of the group, to highlight the various opinions within the group, to start debates.

Exercise 2:

Scenarios of use

To put into perspective collected ideas, to work from hypothesis, to reintegrate complexity into modes of thinking.

Exercise 3 :

Discourses

To choose a spokesperson, to classify modes of representation, to think of a modality of discourse

What is making the ones we call maker?

2014-04-12T16:12:00Z

This project was realized thank to the partnership with the company XL Insurance and the consultancy agency in innovation Passage Management.

A program extended throughout the year composed by a workshop about new working spaces and FabLabs and a partnership with the insurance company XL for the design of an interactive stand of a professional fair.

How to explain what a FabLab is and why this format of production gains more and more importance today? How to combine an exhibition/display space and a space of production/working?

The first part of the workshop was to think and design an exhibition about the culture and the function of FabLabs in the High School.
We started by giving a presentation on the roles and tasks of curators, designers and makers. Then in groups of three, the students worked in thematic days on:
– An iconographic selection of images relevant to the technical and cultural function of FabLab
– A collective mind map to explain and to transmit information about the components and the ways of working in a FabLab
– Volumes and displays allowing us to show all the machines and tools useful in a FabLab

Months later, four students developed their first drafts from the workshop into a technical and relational display to trigger technological innovation culture and to activate a 3D printing machine at a professional fair of insurance. A series a games tackling the issue of societal risks as the sea-bed resources, experimental architecture and the big data was prototyped and printed with the 3D machine by the students. A furniture display was adapted from “the connectors” by the designer Jérôme Dumetz and a collection of postcards on the social movement of the Makers was live printed.

Passage*

2013-08-31T16:09:00Z

Workshop & participatory stage design in collaboration with the theater group Rodéo d'âme

*Original title: Traversées

In august 2013, Les commissaires anonymes collaborated with the theater group Rodéo d' me for a residency program at the theater and cultural center Al Rowwad, at Aïda the refugees camp, in Bethlehem to set a participatory theater show based on the documentary play of israeli and palestinian portraits Frères ennemis. On stage, the israeli soldier Ayal confronts in a cynical TV show, Juliano Mer Khamis, former director of the Freedom Theater of Jenine, killed in 2011. Written from testimonies and interviews, this play by Claire Audhuy reflected on the role of the artist in a situation of oppression and identity conflict: how could artistic creation become an act of resistance?

Les commissaires anonymes realized the set for the stage, organized wall painting workshops and made the display for a fanzine library. The play was presented on the 24th and 25th of august, with a talk afterwards.
A documentary film has been edited with extracts of rehearsals and interviews of actors and the young people involved in the process of the final show.

Documentary film by Baptiste Cogitore. 27 minutes.

To see here

Cova do vapor's flags

2013-08-09T16:10:00Z

sur invitation du collectif ConstructLab

Les commissaires anonymes were invited to the Casa do Vapor, a participatory workshop to set up a collective living space and to open a political space for discussions about the power of the commons to counter real-estate pressure in a fishing village Cova do Vapor in the south of Lisbon. A series of flags were produced as a result of exchanges to do with identity, modes of living and ethics and then raised at key places in the village.

“We searched for the values that could represent the local community and the symbols that we could associate to it. The wind seemed a perfect element to show off the energy of people around the project of Casa do Vapor. By observing architecture and its daily uses, and then through discussions with inhabitants, we collected drawings and pictograms. Cova is not only the sun and the sea, it's also a sardine ><>, a skate-board ramp and a sunset, the birthday of Rodrigo and the Bugio lighthouse, the gathering of a cornetto and an ice lolly, the love, the piracy and the will to fight with others to keep the village alive against the real-estate speculation of the coast.”
Interview of Les commissaires anonymes, extract from Cova do Vapor newspaper.

put the mask, we do the rest

2013-02-16T17:07:00Z

Workshop in collaboration with the artist Caroline Delieutraz
Ecole Nationale Supérieur d'Art de Nancy

The workshop was following protocols to work and meet on the Internet and an object to interact with material reality: an “anti-gaze mask”. The workshop was lead by Les commissaires anonymes with regular online meetings with the artist, around the issue of anonymous figuration on the Internet and with proposals of experimentations in the city of Nancy.

Students in the art and graphics department, Salomé Bernhard, Camille Jacoby, Charlotte Munsch, M'hand Abadou et Thomas Noël appropriated the anti-gaze mask and constructed scenes of daily life with blurred faces. In the scenario they wrote, the eyes of the Google car was entering private rooms and capturing moments of intimate life. The mask, DIY and humorous protection against control became a tool to decipher the representation of the world produced by the Google imaginary.

The non-humans parade

2011-10-07T15:45:00Z

Workshops organized in elementary schools in Bordeaux with Bureau d'études (artists), Vincent Godeau (illustrator) et Nadya Larina (dancer) for the preparation of the masked parade.
Evento 2011

Evolutionary theater was a staging of a system of urban ecology and inter-species democracy on the site of André Meunier in Bordeaux. Four months before the beginning of the car park construction site, The Evolutionary Theater wanted to make visible and to put into conversation all types of living forms, human and non-human, that the process was involved with. Based on the idea that our society doesn't make enough spaces for social solidarity between humans, animals and plants, Evolutionary theater imagined a politic, an economy and a culture common to humans and all the other living forms that we envisage “around” us. The scenario was developed around a parliament of trees, men and women, insects, air, animals, clouds, etc, for concrete actions and speculative narrations.

An installation hosted scientific, cultural and artistic meetings. The non-humans parade, a big walk with masks, was the symbolic gathering and launch event for this attempt to represent an inter-species conciliation.