Chronicle of two days of exploration and complicity with the winners of the Committed Artist Award

On the 17th and 18th of September, Neïl Beloufa, Patrick Bouchain, Santiago Cirugeda, Julio Jara and Cristina Pato, the artists awarded with the Committed Artist Award, met for the first time to explore with the public the unsuspected riches of the Parisian periphery and its inhabitants. An itinerant encounter with youth and transmission between generations as central axes and marked by the joy of sharing, dialogue and living art as a hopeful phenomenon and engine of change.

Crossed views

On September 18 we had the pleasure of meeting Neïl Beloufa, Patrick Bouchain, Santiago Cirugeda, Julio Jara and Cristina Pato, together for the first time on the occasion of a meeting completely open to spontaneity. Exploring, imagining, transforming school was the title chosen for a public debate that took place at the Plus Petit Cirque du Monde in Bagneux, with six young guests: Lucie Cortes, Louis Felice, Yamna Makhlouf, Hugo Sánchez, Estelle Sérèmes and Benjamin Soskin.

“The objective of this meeting was not for the participants to agree on a series of formal proposals over the course of a few hours. The idea was to provoke an exchange of glances between young people and artists,” explains Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau, head of the Foundation’s Citizen Art line. “The young guests, who have expressed their desire to get involved in new, more collective and horizontal forms of learning, are willing to undertake initiatives to push the boundaries, as are the award-winning artists, who dare to go a step further and put their creativity and knowledge at the service of participatory projects in the social field, educational or environmental, among others”.

An idea that is also shared by Mélanie Bouteloup, independent curator: “During the preparation of this event, I met people who were starting their studies with whom I had exciting and enthusiastic conversations. What has surprised me is this common desire to place the human at the center of our ways of learning and living in society. Art has this ability to value the process and to intensify our connections.” The crisis that we have just gone through and that still weighs on us has brutally reminded us to what extent the role of artists can be decisive in a world in which uncertainty reigns. From their position as creative and inspirational figures, artists make a long-term commitment to concrete and demanding actions.

Throughout the dialogue, the most critical observations were mixed with hopes and poetry, and young people and artists agreed on the need to cultivate a plot of freedom and trust in individuals, in the power of the collective, to imagine other possible realities and carry out projects on the margins, projects that generate change.

A Grand Journey together through the Parisian suburbs

The all-important challenge of transmission between generations also took center stage in the discussions. Patrick Bouchain, architect and urban planner, says about it: “I’ve always turned down awards. I have accepted this one as a kind of godfather, together with the Foundation, responsible for passing the baton to artists and citizens who only ask for one thing, to commit”.

Patrick Bouchain, winner of the Committed Artist Award, is one of the promoters of this meeting, from which the rest of the award-winning artists were also invited to participate in an unprecedented tour of the Parisian periphery, by boat, on foot and even camping. “The programme proposed by Le Grand Voyage is exciting and absolutely original,” says Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau. “It has served to introduce the participants to this periphery in gestation, this Greater Paris, rich in its diversity, its urban landscapes and its creativity, promising elements as long as we know how to avoid the mistakes of the past.”

Held within the framework of the European Heritage Days, this multifaceted event has put on the table the question of transmission between generations and its value, as Fanny Taillandier, curator, explains in an interview with France Culture: “What is heritage? Does it necessarily have to be an economic asset? Can it also be a symbolic heritage? Can we talk about an ecological heritage? (…) We are at the same time the recipients of a heritage and those who are going to decide to protect it, to conserve it in order to transmit it. Youth seems to me a good place from which to address these questions, because when you are young, you are more willing to receive but you are also aware that it is possible to refuse to receive. Being young is also saying ‘no, I don’t want this world this way, I don’t want this architecture’. That is why it was absolutely essential to reflect with young people, whether they were students or newcomers to the professional world, to design these tours of the Île-de-France region.”

In this original context, the award-winning artists, some of them from Spain or the United States, proposed improvised artistic actions with the public: Julio Jara proposed the performance “A-corriente”, which took place on the arrival of the hikers in Bagneux, Neïl Beloufa proposed a contest of counting to the absurd, whose rules of the game changed depending on each encounter, and Cristina Pato offered a walk to the sound of her Galician bagpipes mixed with the percussion and dances of the artists of the Koule-Kan France association. For Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau, “This event has allowed the award-winning artists to get to know each other better and identify their common denominators. Different human and intellectual affinities have emerged throughout these two days, during which we have taken giant steps through unusual places on the outskirts of Paris, where the civic dimension of art and culture must find a place that legitimately corresponds to it”.

A community that will continue to grow in 2022

As a final touch to this first edition of the Committed Artist Award, we have laid the first stone for the creation of a community undoubtedly destined to continue growing. The launch of this Award in 2020 allowed us to discover interesting artistic projects and reaffirmed our conviction of how absolutely necessary they are. Thanks to the civic commitment of artists, art also becomes an engine of change, which our society can use to promote dialogue, the creation of common imaginaries and the fulfilment of all people.

We want to continue advancing on this path that we are tracing together with a new edition, in 2022, from which we will continue to promote connections between artists and citizens around ambitious actions, both social and artistic. Our objective is twofold: to connect these artists in a network and to make visible the alternative projects with which they try to respond to our growing needs.