Catherine Rannou: Grand Mesnil Express
Bétonsalon – Center for art and research, requested the artist and architect Catherine Rannou to conduct a program for high school students at the W. A. Mozart High School in Le Blanc-Mesnil. Six Thursdays, from 3pm to 6pm, from January to March, workshops, meetings and outings with architects were organized. The outcome of this project led to the production of a film combining fiction and documentary.
WITH :
Ahmed Kerraz (Professor of Economic and Social Sciences), Olivier Faurisson (Professor of History and Geography)
FILM CREW:
Thierry Goron (chief operator), Catherine Rannou (sound recording)
PROJECT COORDINATION:
Mathilde Assier, Fanny Spano
WITH THE SUPPORT OF :
La Société du Grand Paris
A big thank you to Juliette Giovannoni, Culture and Creation Project Manager
SESSION 1: THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2019
Meeting with Catherine Rannou: Understanding architecture
The high school students build a story around the textures and details of the school’s architecture, using their smartphones, slates and tracing paper. This is followed by a discovery of the courtyard Monument, a artwork created as part of the cultural 1% of the building. The students collectively asked themselves about their own homes and their daily lives.
It was an opportunity to realize that many people lived in homes designed by architects presented by Catherine Rannou. Before embarking on a series of meetings with architects, Catherine Rannou suggested that the students think about a few points : does an architect stand out physically? Does he or she have any OCD? Special ways of expressing himself or herself? What type of vocabulary does he or she use?
SESSION 2: THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2019
Meeting with Marie Hélène Badia & Didier Berger: The world of architecture and its functioning
The first of a series of meetings with architects who have built buildings at Le Blanc Mesnil. Badia & Berger designed the theatre and multimedia library located on the same esplanade as the high school. The objective was to distinguish the urban planner from the architect and the landscaper. This session also allowed students to understand how an architectural firm works, to meet with the notions of "public or pavilion equipment", essential to the development of the urban fabric and social well-being.
SESSION 3: THURSDAY, JANUARY 24, 2019
Meeting with Laurent Tixador: Touching the architecture
Laurent Tixador, an artist of do-it-yourself and experience in its broadest sense, invites students to think about architecture in a new way again. The exercise of the day for this third session is manual, it is about making the habitat of one’s dreams in pasta.
With this everyday food and glue guns, high school students are ready to discover the terms of “model”, “spatial projection” and “scale”. The boundaries between the trades are blurred again because it is an artist who comes to talk about architecture.
SESSION 4: THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2019
Meeting with Iwona Buczkowska: Visiting and feeling the architecture
Iwona Buszkowska is an architect who knows LeBlanc Mesnil very well, having built a social housing district, "La Pièce Pointue", in wood frame - a project that has won several awards. Students learn that the neighborhood where they live was in the 1980s the place concentrating public commissions and committed architects.
Students and teachers are then on their way to a detailed tour of these buildings with the architect. Always equipped with their slates, students are invited to select and then redraw structural details of the architecture from the outside and then from the inside.
SESSION 5: THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2019
Shooting 1/2 workshops and group discussions: Talking about architecture as an architect
For this first shooting session, in order to make the film, the students are separated into small groups to free their speech. From workshop to workshop, they are invited to talk about the architect’s clothing and attitude in a playful and cliché way, to question the “Grand Paris” project and its ecological innovations, to study closely the lexical field of architecture and to express themselves about the binary opposition between the suburbs and Paris. Young graduate artists Naomi Lulendo, Fanny Spano and Romain Grateau and art historian in training, Olivia Cissé, lead these workshops.
SESSION 6: THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
Shooting 2/2 workshops and group discussions: Recreating the architecture around you
For the second shooting session, new workshops are offered to the class divided in two, and, in turn, volunteer students testify about their experience in front of the camera in a quiet room. What could be better than the mobile phone as a tool for understanding an environment?
In the schoolyard, workshops follow one another: filming a detail of architecture in travelling, photographing hands on architecture, filming the drawings of high school students en abyme in the architecture. High school students must send each production to a specific email address so that Catherine Rannou can collect all the videos and photos that will be included in the film. This last session ends with a summary of the precedent ones and a discussion on the future of the film and the future stages of the project.
Share