This participatory performance was part of a CLEA embedded artist residency in Maubeuge Val de Sambre in Northeastern France. Through this residency, artists are selected to propose collective art experiences that involve youth ages 3-25 in the regions and town involved with each project. Over 4 months, I developed a number of works and explorations with different groups of children and youth in schools and community centers in and around Maubeuge, near the Belgian border.
Together we explored place-making on a local scale, through temporary, sculptural gestures. Some of the student groups worked with cardboard camouflage, others used bicycles as rolling stamps to create collective drawings in public places, others works on green graffiti drawings of trees threatened by urban development, and still others worked on occupying space with temporary constructions made with wooden pallets. In the Village of Villers-Sire-Nicole, we focused on mapping as a way to represent the past and situate ourselves in the present.
Kiosque fantôme was a temporary public installation created in Villers-Sire-Nicole in 2016. Students at the local elementary school studied archival photos of the village’s bandstand (Kiosque à Musique). They measured the existing contemporary structure and identified where the previous one had been located. Together we represented the exact placement of the former “Kiosque à Musique” using a dry line field marker.