CAC Brétigny

“Perceptions”
A co-creation project on the uses and accessibility of CAC Brétigny’s website

With Nicolas Faubert and Mona Young-eun Kim, co-created with young people, teachers and educators from the IME Jean-Paul in Evry-Courcouronnes and the youth service in La Norville. 
Curator: Marie Plagnol and Ostensible (Lucie Camous & No Anger)

This project is rooted in CAC Brétigny’s commitment to making its exhibition spaces and online resources accessible to everyone. Influenced by theories of popular education and co-creation, the art centre has launched an inclusive co-creation project involving sighted, visually impaired and blind people. They were given the opportunity to tap into data, ranging from practical information to theoretical texts, from the website and collectively imagine new uses for the art centre’s virtual space. Historically, CAC Brétigny’s collection of in situ artworks have taken the form of commissions specific to the art centre's spaces and their use. In the same vein, this latest creation will be incorporated into the collection to accompany uses of both the art centre's tangible and intangible spaces.

The project is being carried out with an artist who is directly impacted by and whose work deals with disability and ableism, that system of oppression that underpins the symbolic hierarchy between able-bodied and disabled people. It suggests the experience of living with disability be seen as opening up creative possibilities, offering alternatives to dominant perceptions and ways of seeing the world. As No Anger writes:

“Why shouldn’t disability also be seen as a source of diverse possibilities? I experience my disabled body in a completely different way to able-bodied individuals, I experiment with other representations of my body and I create in a different way.”[1]

Nicolas Faubert’s practice, both collective and educational, is open to a diverse range of media and people. Coming from a background in dance, the artist works collectively to build hybrid forms, imagining other bodily and visual languages. As he writes: “his disability [has] enabled him to develop other ways of perceiving movement and space”, which he shares in order to encourage others to develop their own personal artistic vocabulary. Nicolas Faubert has worked with Mona Young-eun Kim, whose work captures signs and visual information, particularly codes from public signage. She distorts and diverts them to create participatory pieces that offer the public the freedom to reinterpret and appropriate these tools of communication and create other modes of connection. The different senses and unique perceptions of each participant were called upon in order to appropriate the content and intended uses of the website and share them online. Together with the artists, they explored the translation of different written and visual languages into movements, sounds and textures. These different materials have been transcribed into a digital artwork, accessible online to all of the art centre’s visitors, as well as into an interactive installation presented at Frac Île-de-France.

Beyond the notion of accessibility itself, the project is underpinned by a desire to establish meaningful diversity. The artists responded by bringing together participants living with and without visual impairment in co-creation workshops. This approach uses co-creation tools to offer participants the opportunity to engage in a joint act of reflection and creation. Research by the artist Marie Preston, which permeates CAC Brétigny’s working methods, resonates once again in this project:

“To come into being as a collective force, each group must decide on founding motions specific to its functioning. This implies the employment of “artifices”, “institutions”. Artifice “tries to drive away arrangements that, in a given situation, block, limit our capacity to act.” It entails the invention of new habits and a belief in their potentially transformative effects. It forces us to “shift” and to think about what seems “natural”.”[2]

In this case, it was necessary to implement “artifices”, protocols for collaboration that allow for horizontality between co-creators. Each of their modes of perception, their unique experiences and the artistic vocabularies they developed alongside the artists contributed therefore to a collective creation and a shared approach to raising awareness of the challenges of accessibility both on the scale of an art centre and our society as a whole.

[1] No Anger, “L’invisibilisation des artistes handicapé-e-s” (“The invisibilisation of disabled artists”), text from a conference at Hôtel de Ville in Grenoble held 6 November 2021 as part of the debate “Validisme, intersectionnalité, lutte pour les droits” (“Abilism, intersectionality, the fight for rights”).

[2] Excerpt from Marie Preston’s book Inventer l’école, penser la co-création, dir. Marie Preston & Céline Poulin, published by Tombolo Presses and CAC Brétigny, 2021.

This project is part of the “Contrat d'Éducation Artistique et Culturelle” (CTEAC) of Coeur d'Essonne Agglomération with the DRAC Île-de-France and the Academy of Versailles. It benefited from the support of the accessibility fund of the Ministère de la Culture—DRAC Île-de-France. The installation Tempo Rubato by Nicolas Faubert and Mona Youg-eun Kim is presented as part of collaboration between CAC Brétigny and Frac Île-de-France within the framework of the territorial programme “Vieilles coques & jeunes récifs” organised by Frac for the Cultural Olympiad and CAC Brétigny's project “Perceptions”.

Nicolas Faubert was born in 1991 in Libreville, Gabon. More than 80% visually impaired, he stands out in break dance rooms by dancing standing up, because of the fragility of his eyes. He is always looking to break down barriers between disciplines (dance, visual arts, singing, photography) as well as social barriers. He was chosen by artist Laure Prouvost for her project at the French Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennial of Contemporary Art. After a two-year residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, he decided to open up his practice to new media. With the pedagogical skills he has acquired in his teaching career and a constant desire, inherited from hip-hop culture, to pass on his knowledge, his research has led him to propose new ways of transcribing art, with no limits on the medium. He is currently resident at the Fiminco Foundation.

Born in February 1988 in South Korea, Mona Young-eun Kim is a visual artist living in France. After obtaining a double degree (2012) in philosophy and cinema from Dongguk University in Seoul, followed by the DNSEP (2018) from the École supérieure des Beaux-arts de Montpellier (ESBA-MO.CO), Mona Young-eun Kim developed her work around questions of the epistemology of subjectivity. Straddling the line between the representation of the conscious and the subconscious, Mona Young-eun Kim's practice is dystopian, satirical and surrealist. She often uses virtual reality to realistically reproduce and modify the surrounding space.

Directly impacted, Lucie Camous and No Anger, as part of the Ostensible duo, have developed an original approach that combines curating and research to question the way we look at disability. Ostensible is a tool for the production and transmission of knowledge, through a multidisciplinary programme.

Marie Plagnol's curatorial practice is rooted in a reflection on the links to be forged between artists, institutions and publics. She is interested in the notion of friendship in its political dimension, as a tool to rethink our networks and communities. After multidisciplinary studies, between philosophy, cultural policies and art history, she worked in a variety of structures and contexts: at the Para Site art centre in Hong Kong, at Council and at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. She is currently Head of communication and mediation at CAC Brétigny. As such, she curates different co-creation projects, is the co-editor of “La Revue”. As a member of the Champs magnétiques collective, she curated the cycles of exhibitions “Des soleils encore verts” (2021) and “Le réseau des murmures” (2023-24).