harvests
2014-2015 / intervention on the physical and virtual spaces of the Barbara school, in Stains (93); image stock and application protocol allowing to update and reactivate the work.
Project carried out in the framework of the 1% artistic contribution.
During a workshop directed by the artist, in collaboration with the cinema teachers, the students of the collège Barbara worked on the relationships between the interior and the exterior of the collège. They filmed their school, but also the Clos-Saint-Lazare estate, the historic city garden and the nearby National Archives. The objective was to capture “the movement, the circulation, the spaces of common use, the places of sharing that the students have chosen according to their daily journeys”, playing with the different meanings of the word “culture”. The word means, of course, the transmission of knowledge, the very principle of education. But it also refers to cultivation, to sowing and thus to the market gardening past of the neighborhood where the college was built. Finally, synonymous with “civilization”, and understood as all the influences undergone by an individual in his or her life (family, history, language, geographical traditions), “culture(s)” reminds us of the mix and the different origins of the students. These images have kept the passage of students in different spaces of the college and the surroundings, promoting a dialogue between inside and outside and relying on the fictional and documentary power of cinema and photography (light, movement, capturing reality, staging …). They are then “harvests”.
Afterwards, these moving images were converted into digital photographs. To do this, the different videos were projected onto a screen that the artist photographed, leaving the camera’s diaphragm open for the duration of each film. The result of these condensed images is similar to “landscapes or settings more or less abstract and colorful, subtly impregnated with traces of the passage of students and other people, the memory of time and human activity affecting the places and spaces.”
From these rushes, the artist made a selection of images which then took over the different spaces of the school, both physical and virtual. Present on the curtains, the windows, the computer screens, or even on the canteen card, the parent-teacher contact book or the administrative documents, the chosen images appear subtly according to the natural light, the position of the person who looks at them and the attention he/she brings to them. A “bank of images” and a protocol established by the artist have been made available to the college to update and reactivate the work in the future.
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