CHAMPS DE FORCE
Luc Lang
“Champs de forces” (“force fields”) is a wording used by Deleuze that I am reclaiming for myself to evoke the meeting by magnetization or opposition of all the media (literature, philosophy, cinema, fine arts, video, performance) that are concerned with a specific problematic; each medium responding to it in its own manner, its own poetic and technique, its tools and its points of view linked precisely to its techniques and processes. Enough to create a force field, a magnetization field, within which every media interact, polemicize together on a same subject. We have already reflected on what is an image and its nature according to the medium that produces it. In 2020, it was a reflection on human gender; in 2021 on the nature of the art object and that of the artist’s work in relation to everyday items and the organisation of work as proposed in contemporary companies. In 2023, in the light of Gunther Anders’ essential reflection on human obsolescence (on the destruction of life in the third industrial revolution era), and Byung-Chul Han’s reflection on the end of things, we worked on the object and the loss of its substance (de-substantialising) in our contemporary world. Indeed, what are the artistic proposals and what are the pragmatics induced by the works offered by a number of artists of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century to resist this destruction?
In 2025-26, we take up the issue of the object again, its dematerialisation and gradual disappearance, in favour of access to functionalities and applications, adding the idea of the body, not just in the inanimate of materials, but in the living, particularly the human body, in an oscillation between the body-object and the object-body.
EXHIBITION-MAKING: CONTEXT, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
Chương-Đài Võ
This course combines research and practice in exhibition-making, leading to a group exhibition at Ygrec in May 2026. We will begin by considering the goals and processes of researching and organizing exhibitions by learning about three significant exhibitions and festivals in different parts of the world: FESTAC ’77 in Nigeria, Chiang Mai Social Installation in Thailand (1992-98), and the Third Havana Biennial in Cuba (1989).
Second, we will consider the context and relevance of ENSAPC and Ygrec: students will present their research about 1968, the context of the school’s founding; and the neighborhood where the gallery is located.
Third, students will develop projects that are in conversation with the school and gallery’s histories, their relevance for today, or the ideas that arise in our conversations about these places.
Guest artist Sabina Gillani will join us for three two-hour sessions: first, to share her research on student-led movements at the National College of Arts, Lahore; second, to present how she weaves together her research about social issues and art material and techniques; and third, how the research informs her artistic projects.
Students will produce work for the exhibition as solo or collective projects.
Additionally, we will work together to organize an exhibition from conception to execution, administration to installation and deinstallation. The exhibition is confirmed for 7-31 May 2026 at Ygrec.
FACE A FACE
Luc Lang
Too often, students have an abstract relationship with the arts via the electrically generated images on their screens. The project is to bring them face to face with the unique physical reality of the works presented at Beaubourg. The idea is to literally come face to face with the work, on a real scale, and to pay special attention to it head on, rather than coming to the museum to check that the work matches the photograph as if it were the original electric image… Each student is asked to select one or more works and present them to the whole group, building up their critique of the body of work. They may pick works because they find them important, interesting or powerful, or because they find them weak or uninteresting. The aim is to develop a personal point of view on the work that is both well-argued and sensitive.
LES FEMMES DANS L’ART (WOMEN IN THE ART WORLD)
Carole Boulbès and Corinne Le Neün
Guests: Camille Morineau, Marianne Derrien
Seventeen years after the ‘Femmes@centrepompidou’ exhibition, which changed the perception of art in France, we will consider the current position of women in art and society, and their relationships with authority and institutions, by giving the floor to invited art historians and artists, who will share their experiences.
During the seminar, we will read and analyse a corpus of texts and images that raise theoretical, critical and political issues. Visits to studios are also planned.
We will start with various publications on the history of art and aesthetics (catalogues, critical essays, works) and the AWARE website (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions). This virtual resource centre was co-founded in 2014 by Camille Morineau, an art historian specialising in female artists. The site is linked to a documentation space in Paris and a residency programme. We will follow the work of two alumni who recently left the ENSAPC: Park Chae Biole and Park Chae Dale from the Nest collective.
ONE + ONE (ÉLOGE DU PARTAGE, DE L’ÉCHANGE ET DE LA TRANSMISSION / IN PRAISE OF SHARING, EXCHANGE AND TRANSMISSION)
Boris Achour
ONE + ONE is back in its second season, with a few tweaks to its rules. This class is still played out in front of an audience and involves two participants, including me. Unlike the first season, the other participant may be another teacher, but also a student or a guest invited for the occasion. It still lasts between two and three hours. The rest remains the same:
— Person A (that’s me) presents the students with a work that I particularly like (film, text, sound, visual art, etc.) with a short introduction to provide context.
— Then, person B does the same with another work of their choice.
— As neither player has been informed of the other’s choice beforehand, each discovers the other’s choice at the same time as the audience. Taking as their starting point the works in question, their creative contexts, their authors or any other parameter deemed relevant, the two players engage in a discussion combining analysis, commentaries, criticisms, references, digressions, ramblings and non sequiturs. ONE + ONE aims to foster:
— The pleasure of sharing a particularly appreciated work with an audience (and explaining why).
— The enjoyment of discussion (listening, exchange, improvisation, but also possible misunderstandings or even dead ends)
— The virtues of transmission
— The active participation of students as a second ONE
PERFORMANCE ENCORE! (POUR PRATIQUER LE MOUVEMENT ET SORTIR) / PERFORMING AGAIN! (TO PRACTISE MOVEMENT AND GO OUT)
Claudia Triozzi
We will continue our outings according to schedules and presentations at various performance venues. Through themed exercises, we will practise movement and tell the movement of the body. Dancing? Performing? Activating? Doing? It will not be a question of defining, but of adapting to created situations. The course will involve pooling and sharing work in progress, focusing on the actions and gestures that we perform and that come to us, stimulated by words, objects and voices. Echoing the material developed during the workshops and the show, we will have the opportunity to think about and weave together a theme in order to develop and construct performative spaces.
Our understanding of space and our perception of others stem from behaviours initiated in actions and movements familiar to our everyday lives. How can we view them differently? How can we give them a new meaning, a different interpretation in the familiar, shared space around us, in order to enter directly into the movement? We will stimulate an experience of listening, highlighting seemingly ordinary details, adopting random group systems, through improvisation oriented towards the construction of space and its interpretation. This approach will be based on returning to our own lived and enacted experiences. This is so that we can find ourselves, adapt to an evolving style of writing, and feel in order to build. Image, dance and writing will be the subjects of our performed research. It is an experience to be lived, as it confronts us with actions that are sometimes difficult to overcome. The different avenues of exploration and discovery will be as many ways of putting personal paths into perspective in order to achieve this.
Two workshops will also punctuate the 2025/2026 academic year, and artist Farah Khelil has been invited to participate in the Friday class.
RADICAL GAZE
Marielle Chabal
« Search for this story, your story, this story with gaps, this story that is missing, that has been cut off from you. And if you cannot find it, this story that also speaks of you, that is hidden from you, come to terms with this loss, create it, write it, make it up. Create. » Monique Wittig
Our relationship with the world is influenced by the narratives projected into our realities, narratives about the history of humanity that shape our lives. Narratives – all narratives – whether in their fabrications, their truths or their structures, are powerful machines of decentring. They can question, reveal or invent other possibilities of existence and, in doing so, these narratives help to construct the ways in which we inhabit the world. Since reality is a construction, fiction is in no way fictitious; it charts paths to be taken and outlines the possibilities of our shared futures. Stories of anticipation — whether utopian, conspiratorial or pessimistic — are now the field of negotiation for our reading of the world, in a social and political context where neither tabula rasa nor headlong flight are an option. Activating possibilities is probably the best way to shape and rearrange reality.
We had seen erotic scenes featuring lesbian vampires and necrophiliacs, demonic witches and stories full of bloody effusions long before we accessed scenes of tangible cyprin. Magical realism, fantasy and horror films have capitalised on the distance inherent in the genre and seized upon queer representation. Fiction drives realities. This seminar covers both formal and political dimensions. We will ask ourselves what stories we need today to infuse our era and how to tell them. We will invent everything we can and assert the need to implement transformative narratives that evoke and allow for desirable changes, enviable futures that we will formalise to make them conceivable.
Fantasy and horror films have taken advantage of the distance inherent in the genre and embraced queer representation. Fiction shapes reality.
THÉORIE ESTHÉTIQUE ET CONSÉQUENCES PRATIQUES – ATELIER DE LECTURE
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
This course will take the form of a group workshop of readings and discussions of texts on art and image theory. Each session will consist of a presentation of a text by one or more students, followed by a discussion of the theoretical, political and historical implications and the consequences that you may draw from them for your practice. This course therefore requires regular attendance and a willingness to take part in a group discussion.
