The Chanot Contemporary Art Centre, in partnership with the École d’art Les Arcades, invites the artist Céline Ahond to lead a workshop at the CACC with a group of preparatory class students invited to bring the exhibition spaces of the CACC to life. The entirety of this collaboration marks a high point in Céline Ahond’s residency with Les Arcades and contributes to part of the exhibition that she is presenting in 2018 at the Ferme du Buisson, located in Noisiel. 

Céline Ahond guides students toward a workshop whose overall project, a performance-encounter, gathers a number of individual projects while proposing a series of protocols and exercises in the aim of playing with the intersections between images and words, as well as with the borders of the real, be it in public space or in the exhibition rooms of the CACC.

This workshop represents the practical application of the book of conversations World Wants Words, the capstone project of her DSRA (Diplôme Supérieur de Recherche en Art). Indeed, Céline Ahond invites students to have their classmates participate in their individual projects in order to build a dialogue between the individual and the collective, with the goal of “capturing lived experience, co-creation, and the unexpected”. Based on the classwork of each student and on shared encounters between students during the workshop, they arrive at the collective construction of a “flash exhibition” entitled Fictive Reality, whose objective is to “examine the illusion of the real, of fiction in art”. Céline encourages students to recreate a fictional world built from cardboard material permitting the creation of “true/false” tools, architecture, animals, clothing, landscapes, etc. All of these elements come to constitute a world in which the students evolve and perform for four days. 

In order to shine the spotlight on this event, a communication strategy is defined before the creation, by the students, of a poster printed at the CACC for the occasion, as well as flyers distributed in the areas neighbouring the art centre. An online communication is also put into place with “desattachesparisiennes”, an Instagram account devoted to and managed by students on a daily basis, accompanied by regular announcements on the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the CACC.

Partners : Les Arcades, Issy les Moulineaux. The artist residency at Les Arcades is supported by the DRAC Île-de-France.