Yvain, mout fus or oublians

For his residency project at ESPE, Éric Giraudet proposes to question the concept of rite de passage and transmission by placing experimentation at the center of the work process.

For La Criée, the ESPE and Réseau Canopé, the project allows to imagine new mediation, teaching and training devices by relying on a process of artistic creation opening to several disciplinary fields.

Éric Giraudet's projects usually begin with fieldwork, an ethnographic experience outside the workshop. In recent years, he has focused his research on traditional games and hidden practices in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, from which he produces new personal and poetic narratives in the form of videos, sculptures, installations or performances. His stories mix history, literature, scholarly, popular or folk cultures, landscape, biology or new media.

After a week of immersion in October 2017, Éric Giraudet stayed from 15 to 26 January 2018 at the ESPE in Rennes. Based on his recent work, Éric Giraudet proposed to student/teacher volunteers to explore different avenues of research: performance, the rite of passage (of the student/teacher), orality and transmission, by questioning how to verbalize knowledge and how to make it a fictional narrative?

According to the material resources of the site, the artist invests the gallery Éc'arts as the setting for the filming of a film, made with a group of M2 students and the college students of Binquenais. In workshop, they experiment with improvisation protocols, performances, text/voice readings, then revisit the courtly novel Yvain, le chevalier au lion de Chrétien de Troyes (Yvain, the knight with a lion by Chrétien de Troyes) and in particular the passage where Yvain turns into a wild man.

In parallel, the students teaching M2 fine arts participate in applied research workshops combining mediation, education and training around the exhibitions of the cycle Alors que j'écoutais moi aussi [...] à La Criée (While I was also listening [...] to La Criée).