Spring School / Doctoral School 2017

For its first year – held from June-16, 2017-  the Spring School facilitated collaborative processes with a community of researchers, artists and PhD students. This group was specialized in various fields such as geography, sociology, dance, visual arts and sound, philosophy, performance, history and architecture. This year 30 participants from 12 different countries – France, England, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Spain, Tunisia, Argentina, Austria, Turkey, Equador and Italy – were selected to participate in this 1st edition. Link to downloadable document : Call for applications

2017 Theme

The objective of this 2017 edition entitled “Gestures of here and there: the sensory making of places” was to arm the participants with artistic tools of new site-specific performance research focusing on the question of the memory of a place. The five days of research enabled the participants and the guest faculty to work on the Bouchayer-Viallet district of Grenoble as a case study based on the sensory experience of research. Its history has multiple layers : industrial, eco-cultural, natural and artistic. Participants were invited to experiment with a diverse selection of research tools exploring different ways of using body data to analyse the traces and imprints of collective and individual actions that produced the site’s historical layers.

The first Spring School in a few words

The success of this first Spring School was largely driven by the disciplinary and methodological synergies that renowned international academics and artists deployed throughout the week.Link to downloadable document full program attachment. Program Arts in the Alps

Each day opened with a one-hour body-practice workshop facilitated by Spanish choreographer Germana Civera featuring movement exercises facilitating the participants’ sensory perception. This prepared the doctorate students for the research practices that were subsequently conducted later in the day in the physicial awarness thematic workshops. Subdivided into groups, the participants then had the opportunity to investigate each workshops’ proposition: Inge Linder-Gaillard (Art Historian, ESAD Grenoble) and Guillonne Balaguer (Artist, Audio Art); Anne Dalmasso (Contemporary History, UGA) and Martial Chazallon (artist, choreographer); Gretchen Schiller (Dance UGA, choreographer) and Helen Paris (Performance, Stanford University EU); Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary (Geography, UGA) and Daria Lippi (artist, theatre).

Based on its interdisciplinary dimension, the Spring School also gave participants the opportunity to follow two philosophy seminars led by Erin Manning (University of Concordia, Canada) and Brian Massumi (University of Montreal, Canada) from a reading and analysis of a text by Gilles Deleuze on the thought of the outdoors theorized by Michel Foucault (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minuit, Paris, 1986.). Each evening of the week, the general public was invited to join the group of participants to attend conferences with the Grenoble architecture companies SILO and NA, the Performance Studies scholar Rebecca Schneider (Brown University, USA), sociologist Anthony Pecqueux (ENSAG Grenoble) and geographer and art scholar Anne Volvey (University of Artois).

Team and partnership

Organizing committee: Gretchen Schiller, Nataliya Grulois, Anne-Claire Cauhapé (Maison de la Création – UGA), Claudine Moïse (LIDILEM, UGA), Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary (PACT – UGA), Anne Dalmasso (LARHRA – UGA), Rachel Thomas (CRESSON, UMR 1563 AAU – ENSAG), Inge Linder-Gaillard (ESAD), Béatrice Josse and Camille Planeix (Magasin des Horizons – Center Marie Roche (The Pacific – Center for Choreographic Development), Erell Melscoet (CCN2, National Choreographic Center), Matthieu Warin (Maison of the Chorier Berriat Residents).
Event organized in partnership with: UMR LITT & ARTS, CRESSON (UMR 1563 AAU, ENSAG), LIDILEM, PACTE, LARHRA, Graduate School of Art and Design • Grenoble • Valence, Store des horizons – Arts and Culture Center, Center de choreographic development The Pacific, CCN2 – National Choreographic Center, House of Chorier Berriat inhabitants.
Financing and logistical support: IDEX Summer School, Grenoble University, UGA Laboratories: LIDILEM, PACTE, LARHRA
Laboratory excluding UGA: CRESSON UMR 1563 – AAU, the National School of Architecture of Grenoble
Partner institutions: ESAD – School of Art and Design Grenoble-Valence, Magasin des Horizons – Center for Arts and Culture CCN2: National Choreographic Center.
Graphic design: Rémi Pollio 

Events

Workshop

Body practice

Germana Civera


Summary :

We worked with the consciousness of the body in a trilateral manner: space, presence and time. We approached the different body systems and its dynamics of perception, kinesthetics, embodiment, the woken and communication. The experience of walking is the matrix cell of every dance. We brought the focus to gravity, breathing, skeleton, the power of energy and its multiple displacements and projections into space.

The goal is to become more aware of the body in terms of presence, space, the other and the limitless and effortless potential movement. At the same time, we are going to establish a common vocabulary in order to name, question and analyze in the body all the different foundational questions that we will put in practice.

Biography : 

Choreographer and dancer, Germana Civera has collaborated with Mathilde Monnier (CCN de Montpellier) and worked with Jérôme Bel, Anne Collod and François Verret. In her creations, she develops and explores dynamics of communication and perception through physical awareness, improvisation, choreographic writing and performance, in association with other artistic media and fields of neurophysiology, philosophy and anthropology.

Mapping lost gestures

Gretchen Schiller and Helen Paris


Summary :

This workshop explores site and seeks to excavate and archive “lost gestures”. We ask how ghost gestures dwell and activate place and bodies. How do they migrate across and through temporalities ? Site will be navigated through sense, body and cellular memory employing the haptic and somatic as well as the autobiographical to create text, gesture, sound and image.

Biography :

Helen Paris : Helen Paris is an Associate Professor of Performance at Stanford University and co artistic director of Curious performance company (London). Her publications include Proximity in Performance: Curious Intimacies, which considers anthropological concepts of proxemics within the context of contemporary performance studies, co-authored with Leslie Hill (2014) and Performance and Place, co-edited with Leslie Hill which explores the sites of contemporary performance and the notion of place (2006).

Gretchen Schiller : Choreographer and Professor in Performance at UGA, Gretchen Schiller is a member of the laboratory LITT&ARTS and head of the Maison de la création. Her choreographic research focuses on body memory, kinesthesia and epistemic implication of the lived body. She edited a choregraphic dwelling with Sarah Rubidge.

Reshaping layers of time

Martial Chazallon and Anne Dalmasso

Summary :

Each day will bring us to work on a different site, indoors or outdoors, from a series of archival documents and sensory tools of exploration. We will guide each participant through sensory and physical experiences in order to collect experiences, feelings, emotions and imagination in direct interactions with the physicality of place. Participants will use their smartphones to document their work during the entire process. The aim will be to gather strata/ layers/surveys of the same site and to share it with others during the final presentation.

Biography :

Anne Dalmasso, Ph.D., is a Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University (France) in Modern History. She directs the research group « Territoires, économie, enjeux sociétaux » at the LARHRA laboratory (UMR 5190). Her research areas are the history of the businesses of the XXth Century, economical history, territorial history and the history of innovation.

Martial Chazallon is a choreographer. He graduated in business studies (École Supérieure de Commerce, Paris, France) and anthropology (Sorbonne University). With Martin Chaput, he has created the company Projet in situ, whose works and choreography  focus on the issue of the intimate and collective memory of  bodies, including their political and social dimension. The company tries to understand how one’s imagination of the body is shaped, in the midst of a renegociation between identity and otherness.

Performative and geographical scores

Daria Lippi and Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary

Summary :

The aim of this workshop is to imagine itineraries at the site of the Bouchayer-Viallet that will combine the participants’ sensory experiences of space. These experiences will be triggered by the interaction with material elements in this specific urban space. The original idea for this workshop is a guided tour where each person is invited to set out for a walk, but it challenges its core definition in that there is nothing in the space pre-set  to explore. The participants will have to organize the ways in which the signs and objects are threaded as an imaginary story woven into their itinerary. On the path they have created together, some signs/ objects will create threads that will weave into a story they will imagine. The interaction extends to leaving ephemeral traces that the next visitors will then be able to grasp.

Biography :

A.-L. Amilhat Szary, Ph.D., is a Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University, France and member of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’ and head of the CNRS Pacte research unit, a pluridisdciplinary social science research center. As a political geographer dedicated to border studies, her latest research concerns the interrelations between space and art, in and about contested places. She is a founding member of the ‘antiAtlas of borders’ collective (http://www.antiatlas.net/en/), a science-art project.

Actress and stage director (Reset Company, France) and trained in dance, Daria Lippi is also a teacher. From 2012 to 2015, she was head of research at the French drama school École Nationale Supérieure d’Art Dramatique of the Théâtre National de Bretagne (National Theater of Brittany). In this context, she created the “Fabrique Autonome des Acteurs” (2014), a transdiciplinary research organisation that brings together teaching and production, where she organises training and directs cross-disciplinary Laboratories (performance/neurosciences, photography and digital arts).

Echology : wordscape inquiry

Guillonne Balaguer and Inge Linder-Gaillard


Summary :

This workshop proposes the poetic, narrative and heuristic sound of a place. Method : a poetic investigation and sound survey of the Bouchayer-Viallet site, an inventory of discrete landscape elements (sounds, voices, glyphs), serendipitous conversations, memory stripping, writing, a fictional glossary, and elaborating sound works (laptop, recorder).

Biography :

Guillonne Balaguer is a poet and a sound artist. Her works explore the links between writing, sound, voice and space. She creates poetic writing, sound experimentations and installations with verbal and non-verbal materials. She has collaborated for instance with the illustrator Miccam (Industries de Diptères, L’Arachnoïde ed., 2014), and the engraver Marc Granier (Jour, Montiels ed., 2016). https://soundcloud.com/guillonnebalaguer

Inge Linder-Gaillard is the director of studies and research at École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et Design Grenoble-Valence (National Art School of Grenoble-Valence). She graduated with a PhD in Art History at the Institut Courtauld (London University). She was previously the head of the exhibitions of the Magasin art center (Grenoble, France).  She also taught “international history of performance” at Pierre Mendès-France University (Grenoble, France).

Philosophy seminar

Erin Manning and Brian Massumi

Summary :

The participants were also given the opportunity to follow a two-days philosophy seminar with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. The two Professors built their analysis from a reading of a text by Gilles Deleuze on the thought of the outdoors theorized by Michel Foucault (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minuit, Paris, 1986.).

Biography :

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale participatory installations that facilitate emergent collectivities.

Brian Massumi is a professor in Philosophy at the Department of Communication at Montréal University. His research, lead in the philosophical perspective of “radical empiricism”, focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary issues in communications (emergent modes of expression and modalities of experience, individual and collective, in particular as revealed by contemporary practices in digital and interactive art) and on contemporary theories of power in the context of globalized capitalism.

Public lectures

Feedback on the architectural service operated at the MAGASIN des horizons between January and April 2017

Carine Bonnot (SILO agency), Sébastien Enault (Cabestan cooperative), Sébastien Fabiani and Mehtab Sheick (NA agency)

Summary :

In order to improve thermal efficiency, to bring up to standards, and to account for the evolution of functional spaces in the art center, a preliminary study was conducted by the architects of the Grenoble-based agencies NA and SILO, together with Sébastien Enault, in order to establish a diagnosis and different scenarios for the transformation of the site. The team, adopting participatory approaches in accompanying the project, performed stand-by architectural duties inside the Magasin in order to collects ideas, opinions and experiences. This study constituted the first step in the transformation project of the art center.

Biography :

Sébastien Enault / Cabestan cooperative: Sébastien Enault is specialised in energetic renovation and thermic audit of  buildings in the Cabestan cooperative. Cabestan brings professionals of the construction industry together to improve their companies and to simplify their administrative duties.

Sébastien Fabiani et Mehtab Sheick / NA agency: The architects Sébastien Fabiani and Mehtab Sheick Badordine met after their studies in the collective “Glaneurs de Possible[s]”. In 2014 they founded  the LLC NA architecture company (Grenoble, France). This agency works in different fields, from individual housing to public fitting, including collective housing or infrastructure such as shops, offices, health care facilities and travel agencies.

Gestures Extending a Hand : Hold It Hold It Hold It

Rebecca Schneider

Summary :

This talk will look at a number of cross-temporal and cross-spatial gestures that extend a hand, from 40,000 year-old Paleolithic negative hands, to recent U.S. Black Lives Matter protest actions “Hands Up”. What is involved in gestural extension? What is the duration of a hand’s wave ? Simultaneously, what kind of proximity can resend at a vast gestic distance ? When we open ourselves to the intervals gestures both inaugurate and reiterate, what becomes of linear time ? And, further, what about the gestures extended among humanity and nonhumanity in what might be thought of as vast prehensibilities of cross-temporal call and response ?

Biography :

A Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, Rebecca Schneider teaches performance studies, theater history, dance studies, visual culture and theories of intermedia. She has written extensively on theatre and performance practices that puncture or stretch the borders of media, writing on plays, performance art, photography, architecture, and “performative” everyday life.

Inhabiting, participating

Summary :

This conference aims at reproblematizing the assumed links between inhabiting and participating: because we live (or don’t live) within such a perimeter, we should (or shouldn’t) participate in surveys concerning this perimeter. The aim will be to broaden these links, taking as our starting point an ethnographic study conducted amongst the most vulnerable populations in the Grenoble region, and in particular “the people living off the street”, in other words precisely those who we have trouble considering as living within that perimeter.

Biography :

Anthony Pecqueux : Anthony Pecqueux is a researcher with the CNRS, and head of the laboratory Ambiances Architectures Urbanités (team CRESSON, ÉNSAG – school of architecture, Grenoble, France). After a PhD in sociology at the EHESS (specialist higher education establishment in social science, Paris, France) regarding the moral and political impact of the French rap, he now focuses his research on developing an ethnography of the perception through an echological and sensible approach of urban experiences. He belongs to the editorial board of the French journal of social sciences Tracés.

When standing on the slipperiness of the field between arts and geography... aesthetics of knowledge is the issue

Anne Volvey


Summary :

This cross-examination of arts and geography is guided by a special focus on methodological practices (of arts and geography) – which can be described as the notion of the shifting of the field –, and, on an epistemological level, is tackled in terms of aesthetics régimes of spatial knowledge – that is, the aesthetic processes that orient the formation of spatial knowledge. This paper is about empirical and theoretical elements that help to sutain the understanding of spatial knowledge formation in terms of aesthetics. Beyond methodological practices as “manières de faire avec l’espace”, it focuses on the key roles of the body and of the emotion within the involved processes of spatial knowledge formation.

Biography :

Anne Volvey : Anne Volvey is a professor in Geography at Université d’Artois (France). Her research is at the crossroads between art geography and the epistemology of science and space. For some years now, she has been developing a geographical perspective on the arts – articulated in terms of spatial curve and of the orientation of the epistémè in/of the arts –, and its epistemological consequences in geography.