Marie-Françoise Chavanne

Territories of a dreamy wandering or the (wandering) vagrancy of reinvented memory

I sent this text in a pretty handwritten envelope to each of my final year students. In this enigmatic and personal envelope, they were asked to bring their memories, a personal photo and their equipment to the next class. Well before the set date, they brought their creations. A few days later I received a notice in my mailbox announcing the loss of my memory and asking me to “bring my childhood memories to the next class.”

Neither they nor I obeyed the request order! As a challenge, we all “exhibited” our “territories”, our “wanderings”, in the plastic arts room. Silence, discovery, emotion, surprise, laughter, questions about hidden, invented, dreamed or true stories…

Breaking into art is a somewhat iconoclastic, impertinent, social and political challenge. In a word, it is a project for art education and citizens. It is a major challenge for expression, understanding, emancipation and freedom. We find the break-in through the desire and longing for differences, for the unknown, the unexpected and the otherness. An adventure for the visitor in art that would draw rough rivulets, in impenetrable landscapes, just to advance towards a difference, be surprised not to know, not to see in order to look differently.

What to do with all those scraps of reading, those trivial vacuums, those spaces, and those surfaces that appear under the figure, those traces that say nothing but what they are? 

Can we finally study images that open on the difference, that disobey rules, conventions, to become critical, dialectical. Double game therefore of the image that deserves better than a reading, a “look”. The moving gaze enters the work, plunges beneath the surface, identifies space, depth, gesture, signs, traces, memory and repentance, the invoice... a gaze that circulates, stops on the image, joins and disconnects the formal and semantic elements to offer itself the pleasure of a discovery, an adventure.

“Fortunately, society has reserved a practice of escape, that is an artistic practice.” “Art, the teaching of art, education as art hold the power to tear apart, to break down the identitarian closure and the social body”. Jacques Cohen. 

It is an important challenge to approach and discover our identities and differences, to accept the beautifying and disturbing power of art, of the others, of the creative, political, ethical or even iconoclastic power of artists...

Marie-Françoise Chavanne – past president of InSEA