Students of the Beaux-Arts of Paris and laureate artists of New Worlds will present from 11 April new creations made during research workshops. A life-size exercise whose ambition is to encourage dialogue between professional artists and future artists.
A meeting placed under the sign of creation, this is what the Beaux-Arts of Paris and New Worlds promise, by launching 11 to 16 April, an event that will mix, in several spaces of the establishment, dance performances, concerts, puppet shows, public workshops, debates, readings, exhibitions or film screenings...
Creation in all its forms, in short, including those not suspected, made by some twenty laureates of New Worlds artists and students of Beaux-Arts de Paris who, since the beginning of the year, have shared their visions, crossed their practices and resolutely transgressed artistic boundaries during workshops conducted in the company of the school’s teachers.
These exchange times will give rise to original creations, which will be presented alongside a hundred works by winning artists of New Worlds, a device launched in June 2021 as part of the France Relance plan. Alexia Fabre, Institutional Director and Bernard Blistène, Chairman of the Artistic Committee of New worlds, return to this ' unprecedented event ».
You are launching this new partnership between Mondes nouveaux and the Beaux-Arts de Paris. How did the idea of this association come about?
Alexia Fabre: Last spring, Bernard Blistène and his team came to us to propose an implantation, or even a rooting of New Worlds at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. This proposal seemed to us to be extremely gratifying and meaningful since there are many points of convergence between us.
First of all, there is this call for young creation with the artists of Mondes Nouveaux on one side and our students on the other. There is also the establishment in a reinvented world which is one of the bases of New Worlds and which is also something that we cultivate at the Beaux-Arts. We prepare students for what awaits them and the world for the arrival of these artists.
Then there is the trust in creation that we collectively have. We both know that the long time is necessary to transmit the process of creation, to accompany it in the long term. And finally, there is this hybridization between genres which constitutes one of the principles of New Worlds. This is something that is dear to us at the School, because we do it through workshops with disciplines, artists who teach and who lead workshops and who themselves invite other artists. Our teaching is not prescriptive: students can build a particular path by navigating from one workshop, one practice, one discipline to another.
Bernard Blistène: The idea was that professional artists could meet artists in training. And the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the flagship of higher education Culture that symbolizes transmission, was really the ideal place to achieve this ambition. There is a fine line between when you are a student and when you enter the workforce. If you want to study something from this passage, the better to understand, it is necessary to question both those who are still in the student life and who will soon enter the professional life and reciprocally to grasp what becomes at the moment when we confront the reality of the artistic ecosystem in all its complexity.
What do you think can emanate from these meetings, both from the point of view of creation and arts education?
A.F.: These meetings open up unknown perspectives, unexplored horizons. This contact with outside artists represents an opportunity because it gives rise to conversations that are not restrained, not normalized. The workshops are very open and connect different worlds between guests, workshop leaders and students. What I think is very important is that students be able to invent what they are going to use and that they not stay on traditional devices that sometimes force them.
B.B. : At the heart of these stories are also teachers who, at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, are also artists. I found it quite exciting that they could be the interface for this dialogue to be built, especially since we have highlighted, with New Worlds, the pluridisciplinarity and the extreme diversity of practices, which we see in the Beaux-Beaux-Arts with workshops and courses in areas such as live performance or writing. We thus find here the amplitude on which the team of New Worlds built the project and it is obviously something that I thought essential to take into account.
Alongside these original works will be presented a hundred works from New Worlds, previously scattered throughout the territory. What is the interest today in grouping them together?
B.B. : At the time of the creation of New Worlds, the objective was to interfere, to weave dialogue in the most diverse territories, both with the places that the Centre des Monuments Nationaux offered us and with those of the Conservatoire du Littoral. But we were also aware that we had to find a place where we wondered what had been achieved. We also knew that, for geographical reasons, since we had also conducted the survey in the overseas territories, visitors had not been able to go from one place to another to see a project, especially since some were ephemeral – such as those related to live performances or performances. What I also liked was the idea of seeing these projects from different backgrounds and disciplines interact and watching them confront the School, the students and their teachers.
The result of this collaboration will be presented to the public at a major creative event in April. What can the public expect?
B.B. : First, I would like him to immerse himself in what he will see and come back, to wander around and have multiple experiences in these beautiful places that are so conducive to discovery. One does not approach the school chapel and its mouldings oh so emblematic in the same way as a place of meetings like the courtyard of the mulberry tree or conferences like the auditorium. Caroline Naphegyi, whom we asked to federate the project, wanted to propose an experience that is open and I would like this experience to be one of meaning and meaning.
A.F.: We can expect surprises and formats that go beyond what we know. This meeting will do justice to creation and the different paths it takes today with different durations and hospitality of other forms. I find the idea quite beautiful that, at the heart of a school where each student can create a different path with workshops where he discovers and associates the practices, we have these different formats that mix plastic, vocal or musical form.
We will have different temporalities with moments to grasp and things that remain. Earlier, we were talking about hybridization, conversation, blending and mixing, and I think this project is very strong for that. There may be surprises but if an art school does not allow this, it would be very worrying!
Find here the entire programme of the artistic event Mondes nouveaux x Beaux-Arts de Paris
