From January through the end of May, I will be an artist-in-residence at the Maison Huvenoit in Jeumont. My CLEA residency (Contrat Local d’Éducation Artistique), focused on public art, is sponsored by the Communauté d’Agglo/ Maubeuge Val du Sambre, the DRAC, and the Ministry of Education in France. I will be working on installations, performances, and permanent sculptures that explore the physical and cultural presence of youth in the region, near the Belgian border. The interventions will represent the relationships that I observe between these publics and the spaces they live and work in. My goal is to encourage youth to engage with and invest in the public spaces around them.
The CLEA is a social-practice-based art/education residency that began in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in France around Lille and has since been adopted by the Ministry of Culture and extended to other parts of the country. The residencies in Maubeuge Val de Sambre have been ongoing since 2011 (for additional documentation of past projects, click here, here), and here. My project, involving youth between the ages of 3 and 25, will take place over 5 months in a geographic area that includes 42 different towns and villages (communes). To learn more, please follow my updates on facebook: KasiaOzgaArt.
Here is a video of one of the finished projects:
Kiosque fanto?me from Kasia Ozga on Vimeo.
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. They measured the existing 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.