Residency
L’éventualité d’une sirène
Laurent Duthion
from February to May 2008
école élémentaire Jean Moulin, Rennes
La Criée is initiating an artists in residence project in state primary schools, in partnership with the City of Rennes and the Ministry of Education. This programme is intended to facilitate access to culture and to contribute to the development of artistic and cultural education in schools in priority education areas.
These residencies are intended as long-term ventures, in the interests of allowing the children to try out an artistic approach, discover the creative process leading to a work of art, and develop a special relationship with the artists. The aim is also to provide other forms of learning by stimulating pupils’ sensory intelligence, imagination and creativity. The projects are drawn up at the beginning of the school year in consultation with the teaching staff; in this way the educational objectives are jointly defined, together with a framework of practical work and exchange that suits both artist and pupils.
For the first segment, La Criée is inviting artists Julien Jeanne and Laurent Duthion to work in a school for 3 to 5 months. The artists were chosen for their readiness to include in their creative agenda such practices as exploration, sensitive handling of spaces and objects, heuristics, spatial understanding, and outreach. In doing this they put their own practice to the test in an educational context, while fuelling receptivity to the visual arts and interdisciplinary approaches: between art and science for Laurent Duthion and between the visual arts and the stage for Julien Jeanne.
L’éventualité d’une sirène
Laurent Duthion plans to focus on the notions of learning, discovery, experimentation and invention. This residency has been designed to fit with Duthion’s exhibitions at La Criée and at the Ateliers de Rennes Biennial; this will help the children concerned to grasp the process of carrying out an art project. The residency is intended to highlight the relationship between art and science and to be perceived first and foremost as an experiment using drawing, language and model-making as tools for the production of a work of art.
