Campus, under the direction of Laurent Pichaud
ex.e.r.ce masters program at the CCN Montpellier
October 15 to November 30, 2012

With Mithkal Alzghair, Estelle Gautier, François Geslin, Seyoung, Jeong, Ana Maria Krein, Min Kyoung Lee, Renata Piotrowska, Lynda Rahal, Viktor Ruban, Sacha Steurer, Samil Taskin, Anja Sauer – Erasmus exchange student from the University of Giessen, Michael Helland – invited through Wild Card Jardin d’Europe program supported and financed by the European Union, and invited trainees Julie Gouju, Rodolphe Keller, and Julien Martinez

Art/life, a campus, during 2 x 3 weeks, questioning oneself as a student: There is a certain history of arts in the twentieth century, whether choreographic or plastic. They chose art and life. Their names were Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou, Allan Kaprow… they could be choreographers wandering in Nature and its motion, in public spaces as a political action. And there is the Master’s degree: what does it mean to study art nowadays, or more precisely, how is our creativity as art students triggered when we endeavour to l-earn, i.e. receive? Art/life, a campus is the core of all these questions and the place to be to get some answers. That is, literally, a 6-week camp in Yano Studio. A camp not intended to receive conventional education and knowledge but to go and get ourselves some know-how from the surrounding Reality, whether in public space, in books or in the people met spontaneously or invited to feed our research. As the nomads that we are, we shall collect and experiment these daily backgrounds – whether artistic or educational – around and inside the camp, we will manufacture this knowledge found or spurred as a daily process.

This is our assumption: whatever we do, we will undergo an artistic process to be created and/or implemented. This provisional campsite will be an adaptable place to populate, day after day, with: life, community, creations, thoughts, rest, contribution, exchanges, invitations, and work. This site will be built from the point of view of form and implemented from the point of view of art, will unfurl little by little using our student research, through multiple layers of experiments summoned by the participants. For there will be participants, and visitors, but since we like to play, we will be unaware of what they will be called and what they will do, when they will come or what they will bring. Because they will also be in touch with what we will be looking for without knowing it, the only skills they will bring being those that we will stir in them. Visited visitors. This public campus will be an open one. Two public exercises will highlight our wanderlust, plus a final one in which together we will break camp and go back to our student lives.

– Laurent Pichaud