Revealing other presences
The artist Ariane Michel invites us to relocate, to move outside of ourselves so as to modify our perceptions and wander the world as an other.
Ariane Michel
Ariane Michel is an artist and filmmaker. After studying at the l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and a passage through the research cell of the Palais de Tokyo, Le Pavillon, she implements installations, performances or videos that capture insignificant lives to magnify them. By decentering the gaze and immersing the viewer in the skin of rocks, shores, seals, mosquitoes... She questions the relationship of man to other beings with whom he shares his environment.
Revealing other Presences
Undoing our anthropized visions of the world has become so central to the foremost thinking in the realm of contemporary art that this decentering seems to have become both its role and primary mission. Through her films and installations, the artist Ariane Michel invites us to relocate, to move outside of ourselves so as to modify our perceptions and wander the world as an other. In her pieces she notably uses animals, plants, stones, and the force of the elements, so as to create many new centers of the world and perceptive possibilities. Using tools from the field of cinema and by involving the living, she incarnates in both an artistic and immersive fashion a disanthropization of the world which manipulates the perception of time and shifts points of view by involving the spectator in new relationships. Overwhelming our imagination, she invites us to recreate the world by repositioning us as one element among many others.
Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
Collaborating with situations
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Design: Reparation
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
From "Mediance" to Places
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
An Attempt to Drain Places
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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