Monument Edition 3 EN by Monument

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Editorial p. 4

Collector edition, making p.152

Mary Paterson, Aftermath p. 6

Antoine Huet, The emergence of a form p. 66

Jocelyn Cottencin Échauffement p. 80

Guy Sioux Durand The united forces of hunters, shamans, and warriors in the work of Léa Le Bricomte p. 102

Laurent Sfar Current research around the realisation of glass bunkers p. 126

Monument — Document, Barbara Forest (à partir de Monument 3 au musée des beaux-arts de Calais) p. 156

Laurent Moszkowicz, An artistic adventure... p. 180

A conversation with Isabelle Marchaland, an art teacher at lycée Dumont d’Urville secondery school in Caen et with Anne Florin, an english teacher at lycée Dumont d’Urville in Caen by Mathilde Johan. p. 188

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BOOKLET 1 -

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Mary Paterson writer and curator

Time and Place (TAP) is a collaborative European project involving five cultural partners: Fabrica, Brighton, and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich, in the UK; MusĂŠe des Beaux-arts, Calais, FRAC Basse Normandie, Caen and the District of Calaisis in France. It runs from 2012 to 2015, and includes exhibitions, residencies, education programmes and live events. From 2012-14, Time and Place programmed events under the theme Aftermath. This included a series of group shows called Monument, which were organized collectively and shown in Norwich, Caen and Calais. In 2014, the centenary year of the start of the First World War, Fabrica commissioned me to respond to the Aftermath theme and its elements in writing. This text is the outcome of that commission. It is a movement through the themes of material, memory and forgetting invoked by the concept of aftermath, from the perspective of a journey between all aspects of the TAP programme. The privilege of writing is that it travels in time and space, and I have written about and remembered artworks in TAP as if they exist together, without differentiating between where or when they appeared, unless it is directly relevant to the movement of the text. This text is not a review, and it is not a comprehensive overview of the Aftermath theme or its elements. It does not examine every 6

artwork that was collected under the theme , and of the ones it encounters, does not contain all their meanings and their memories. Documentation and essays about the work and EDIthe artists are available through the TAP website. [https:// TION N°3 timeandplaceproject.wordpress.com] and in the three editions of FEBRUARY 2015 booklet the Monument Revue. [http://issuu.com/timeandplace] n°1 Instead, this text is a meditation on language, memory and journeys of meaning in relation to an extraordinary body of work. It takes the form of collected fragments, which do not constitute an argument, but an atmosphere. The text is designed to be read in pieces, in a loop or in repetition. It is designed to be read more than once, like a short film or a song that you might return to. It is designed to echo the weave of the relationships between two countries, five organizations, and a range of artistic experiences. It is designed to be in motion. The cover image is Escape Map by Carol Fékété, 2013. All large images are taken from Jan Lemitz’ project, Innocent Passages, 2014. Lemitz was also artist in residence at Fabrica for the TAP project. Visit his blog at https://innocentpassage.wordpress.com. All other images, in the text, are from the Monument exhibitions. Mary Paterson, London 2015 http://aftermath-aftermath.org/

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Carole Fékété Escape Map Photography, shot and analogical printing, to aluminium 2013 (Silk escape map, RAF, second war. Collection of the Museum of Memory 1939 – 1945, Calais) Museum of fine arts, Calais, acquisition with the support of the Regional Fund Acquisition of Museum (State/ Council Regional Nord-Pas-deCalais) N° inv. 2013.1.1 © Carole Fékété 9

“Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre,” writes Walter Benjamin, in a text quoted at the front of four glossy photograph books by Didier Vivien, 1914 [Cold Memories] 2018 (2005 - ongoing).1 The books are displayed in the draughty undercroft beneath the war memorial in Norwich’s busy town square and, before, in a narrow room in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais. “It is the medium of past experience” Benjamin continues, “as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.”2 Meaning is a redrafting of the past, excavated with the tools of the future. Language is one of those tools –albeit a twisted instrument, full of holes and absences and the ambivalence of translation. Inside Vivien’s books, contemporary photographs of the landscapes of World War One battlefields are overlaid with the names of soldiers who died there. The names reveal only the limits of unknown lives: the start and end dates of a stranger’s subsistence, with nothing of the in-between. In contrast, the landscapes are all in-between spaces – walls, fields, anonymous stretches of motorway. It’s as if everything in these pages is trying to leave apart from the names, which have nowhere else to go. Imagine for a moment how Europe looked before the first world war: no electricity wires, no motorways, no supermarkets, no monuments to a generation of the dead. Seen alone, either the language or the imagery in Vivien’s work is strikingly familiar. The names recall the roll calls of the dead on cenotaphs across Europe. The images recall the histories of landscape painting and photography, symbols of

1. Didier Vivien, 1914 [Cold Memories] 2018 (2005 – ongoing). Supported by Museum of Fine Arts, Calais and Sainsbury Centre for Visuals Arts, Norwich 2. Walter Benjamin, quoted in Didier Vivien, 1914 [Cold Memories] 2018, p 3 10

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In English, ‘aftermath’ suggests an origin; it implies an other which came before. It motions towards a beginning, and even to use the word is to affect the origin that justifies the idea. The projects collected under the theme Aftermath are linked in my travels and simultaneous in my memory: Brighton, Norwich, Caen and Calais. I visit or read or imagine all that I can, travelling on a narrative of intent supplied, retrospectively, by the unity of a theme, a starting point I will never find. Aftermath suspends me in motion. It is not just a series of artworks and events, but an overarching aestheticisation of the experiences in and between them all.

ownership that equate vision with knowledge, and land with territory, property, or holy supervision. In Norwich, a woman leafs through the pages, chatting loudly. “We learnt nothing from these wars” she says. “And do you know the funny thing? I have two daughters. They both joined the army.” But together, the words and the pictures start to look strange. The juxtaposition exposes the slippages and failures of each in its claims to knowledge. Page after page, book after book, anonymous highway after sad and silent name. The words evoke a past to which, the images insist, we can never return. This gap between word and image is poignant, and devastating. It is impossible to remember, the books say, but necessary to try.

The building crumbles, brick by brick. The brick crumbles, grain by grain. What remains of the structure sags, as if it can no longer be sustained – this effort against gravity, this will to survive, this discipline of the upstanding. In a moment, a teenage boy will run past, bending his body to echo the curve of a glossy ball of barbed wire that shines, beautiful and hostile, at the foot of the stairs. But for now he says, “Wow!” and points at the bricks. “Impressive!” The boy and I are both the same height as a disintegrating building that has been constructed inside the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. We stare, eye to rubble, at Things That Fall Apart (2008 – 2014)* by Andrew Burton, an installation of miniature bricks that hold the fragility of a sandcastle, the grandeur of an ancient ruin, and the impossible scale of a doll’s house. The artwork is built with no mortar, no windows and, I was thinking, before the boy came to stand next to me, no hope: it disintegrates with the futility of all structures designed for protection. But the boy sees something different. He wonders aloud how long it took to make and the invigilator tells him – the artist built it himself, she says; he remakes it anew each time. 12

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Meaning is a redrafting of the past, excavated with the tools of the future. Language is one of those tools – albeit a twisted instrument, full of holes and absences and the ambivalence of translation. The words you choose leave other meanings stranded. The stories you tell leave other tales untold. Better, then, to stay within the story, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to leave a trail and return to it later, to repeat yourself, to end at the beginning.

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 15

The boy runs down the corridor to tell a friend, bending his body round the curve of a barbed-wire ball as he goes: oblivious to danger. “A creature’s perception is exactly proportioned to its action upon the thing,” writes the philosopher, Brian Massumi. “The properties of the perceived thing are properties of the action, more than of the thing itself.”3 The boy sees the crumbling collection of tiny bricks as a feat of engineering or a kind of play. I see it as a tombstone, a monument to the desire for safety. Perhaps that’s because I know we are inside one of three exhibitions called Monument, 4 taking place as part of a three-year collaboration between four art institutions across two countries, under the umbrella theme: Aftermath. ‘Why did you choose the theme, aftermath?’ I ask, a few weeks earlier, to the curators and gallery directors involved. Pause. There is no word in the French language for ‘aftermath’. The closest word is ‘consequences’, which does not have the same connotations of tragedy. The English and French languages share 70,000 words, but aftermath is not one of them. We do not share the word, and we do not share the concept. Things That Fall Apart is both the castle that the boy sees and the ruin that I do. We stand next to each other in silence – the boy, the building, and me. “This does not mean, on the other hand, that the properties are subjective in the perceiver,” writes Massumi. “On the contrary, they are the tokens of the perceiver’s and perceived’s concrete illusion in each other’s world.”5 The boy, the building and me stand together in silence, seeing versions of each other shaped by what we already hold true.

3. Brian Massumi ‘The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason’ in Stelarc: The Monograph ed. Marquard Smith (MIT, 2001), p. 126 4. The exhibitions were at le FRAC BN, 21/02/14 – 13/4/14; le Musée des Beaux Arts, 08/03/14 – 16/11/14 (this show included three different hangs); Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 29/03/14 - 14/9/14. 5. Ibid 16

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 17

Léa Le Bricomte redrafts the past, repurposing old medals into Modernist drip paintings*; adding feathers to bomb shells to turn them into mythic objects; inviting an orchestra to make a new symphony using the burnished cases of used-up weapons.6 What kind of distance do you need to be able to re-use this past? How far must you come from memory in order to cast off its claims to the real? What is the difference between repurposing the materials of war, and casting an editor’s eye between photographs of suffering? The symphony chimes and echoes like bells tolling for the dead. The mythic objects recall earlier, imperial conflict. The simplicity of the ribbons is troubled by the detail of the embossed medal heads. What is the duty of memory, and who is it to? Is it my duty to remember? Is it your duty to forget? Beware of the imperative to “commemorate now and always,”7 says the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. How do you know, after all, how things will mean in the future? Jocelyn Cottencin draws silhouettes of public monuments into letters of the alphabet, uniting words and symbols in a double language.8 Société Réaliste repurposes the flags of UN members into camouflage patterns, as if in homage to the war that made the UN a necessity.9 Michel Aubry summons the ghosts of a ceremonial feast from the paraphernalia of World War One trenches.10 Do these transformations carry the weight of the past with them into the future? Do they cling to memories of the real? Or do they imagine difference, summoning up a magician in place of a witness?

6. The artworks described are Léa le Bricomte Sounds of War (2012), Guerres de Tribus (201214, sculpture series); Dripping Medals (2012) sculpture, augmented military medals and ribbons) 7. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, 2006), p.89 8. Jocelyn Cottencin, Monumental Typeface (2012), commissioned for the Monument exhibitions. 9. Société Réaliste UN Camouflage (2012) 10. Michel Aubry Tables (1914 – 2003) and Lustre [Chandelier] (1914 - 2002). 18

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To collaborate is to share skills, knowledge and resources on a joint project. In artistic terms, collaboration often means a levelling of power, an attempt to create a team of equals. But under the shadow of World War Two, ‘collaboration’ had a very different connotation. For occupied countries, to collaborate was to reconcile the home government with the invading power; to work, traitorously, with your enemies. In two generations, the word has changed from facilitating evil, to building friendship.

In English, aftermath means the effects of a disaster, often war. It means the unforeseen ripple of events that happen as a result of something else. It means the unknowable, the unspoken and the yet to be seen. (There is no word in the French language for ‘aftermath’. The closest word is ‘consequences’, which does not have the same connotations of tragedy.) In Calais, the artist John Cornu* is stringing dozens of small, metal stars to the ceiling. The stars are painted black, matt black – the kind of black that swallows light and demands you lean in close to discover its true shape. When you lean in close you see that these are not really stars, but caltrops – traps set in the no-man’s land of the First World War, in order to spike through hooves and feet of troops advancing from the trenches. The weapons spin gently on invisible lines of picture wire. Meaning is a redrafting of the past. It is the way you map knowledge onto perception in order to see the future. “It is an understatement to say that a creature’s perceptions are exactly proportioned to its actions. Its perceptions are its actions – in their latent state.”11 Aftermath does not just signify a gap between the languages of English and French. It also signifies a gap in understanding, a shortfall of memory, a problem with perception. Aftermath is to do with the limits of meaning itself. Cornu’s artwork, Brume (2012), was installed earlier in the year in Norwich, in the cavernous space beneath the war memorial in the town centre. There, I sighed at its beauty: a flock of birds caught mid-flight. In Calais, I already know the nature of these suspended shapes. Here, I see instead the slow, exploded moment of a soldier’s scream.

11. Ibid 20

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I (you) do not see. I (you) miss things. I (you) imagine. I’m (you are) not sure I (you) could tell you (me), now, the difference between what I (you) remember and what I (you) have imagined.

What is the difference between a silver sphere, and a ball made out of barbed wire?12 What is the difference between a sculpture made of stone, and a sculpture carved from soap?13 Can you feel the razor blades prick your fingers? Can you taste the grease on your tongue? Is meaning an intellectual pursuit, or a bodily one? Is it the progress of words across a screen, a list of names to be read in stone, a translation from one moment in time to another? Or is it the feeling of what might come, the sub-conscious sense of potential, the simultaneous synchronicity of time, the vibrations of the unknown, as it tears at the edges of the real? In a moment, a teenage boy will run past, bending his body to echo the curve of a glossy ball of barbed wire that shines, beautiful and hostile, at the foot of the stairs. Is his bodily reaction meaning? Is his body a prediction of the truth? Is it something you can share? Is it something you can both remember?

The second time I see Boris Chouvellon’s Sans-Titre (2007-2011)* it is the day of the Scottish referendum, which will decide whether Scotland remains part of the UK. The series has moved from a corridor in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts to a long, windowless room in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais. It shows fifteen photographs of weathered and destroyed European flags, which the artist found flying above a fairground in south France. Each flag is framed against a perfect blue sky, its tattered rags whipped by a silent storm. There is always compromise in collaboration: ‘Aftermath’, for instance, is an English word with no French equivalent. It links this series of international exhibitions and events to the First and Second World Wars, and connotes as well the ongoing conflicts in the middle east, and the

12. Djamal Kokene Ligne de fruite (2010) 13. Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet Soap Sculpture (series, 2013) 22

Memory is like an expanse of terrain â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it does not just exist, it must be traversed. And each journey involves a decision about where to go: which aspects of memory to remember, and which to forget. Forgetting, then, is the route-map for memory. And if a monument is a type of collective memory, it is also a type of communal forgetting.

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Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, (like a map that is not yet a map, like a weapon softened to a feast, like an actor moving between characters) in a perpetual motion of potential. Change comes in the form of repetition, or more accurately, in the gaps that emerge in repetition. Change comes in the perpetual motion of potential, in the moments before meaning is defined. It comes in the unfamiliar familiarity of something that is seen anew.

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 25

perpetual spectre of war (‘on drugs’, ‘on terror’) hallucinated by Western governments on behalf of their citizens. The word ‘Aftermath’ gives shape to the artworks collected under its name. Imbued with suggestions of a ‘before,’ Aftermath summons up the ghosts of its imagined origins at the same time as it moves towards the unknowable, the unspoken and the yet to be seen. It weaves objects and experiences into each other; and it introduces its own spectres: the ambivalence of translation, the activities of meaning and memory, the narratives of history. The outcome of the Scottish vote is too close to call. Campaigners on each side claim to stand for national pride, rallying their troops towards the protective arms of a mythic Europe. One side says an independent Scotland will thrive within the EU, the other says the EU desires only a powerful and united Britain. On the day of the Scottish referendum, Boris Chouvellon’s photographs of worn and ragged flags represent the frailty of hope. What are political treaties except threads battered by the winds of time? What is unity apart from a set of patterns and promises? Who keeps the promises that these flimsy materials make?

… blackened by the heat of battle, still living amongst the ruins, still subject to the dramas of daily life …” Between the appearance of a woman, filmed reading at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a man, filmed reading at the beginning of the twenty-first, there is a narrative, emblazoned across the screen of Jordi Colomer’s American Soup (2013), like the captions to a silent movie. It refers to the catastrophic wars that defined the intervening years. “… we rose to replace the buildings completely destroyed …”14 Bombastic and patriotic, the words tell a story of heroic triumph over adversity. They tell the story of the construction

14. Jordi Colomer, American Soup (2013), commissioned by the FRAC, Basse-Normandie. My translation 26

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On the day of the referendum, when our country might be torn in two, we visit the Museum of Memory, and see a man who looks like our grandfather. He makes us remember the war.

of American-made ‘prefabricated’ housing, built as temporary shelters after the Second World War, but still inhabited now. Colomer’s film is a series of repetitions of the improbable. It documents two dinner parties organized for current residents of the ‘UK 100’ model of housing. For each party, Colomer decorates a pre-fab with pictures from the permanent collection of the FRAC in Caen:15 incongruous relics of pop art and modernism cluttering a tidy interior. At each party, the same people sit around the same table, eating food from the same Tupperware boxes, making similar kinds of small talk. It’s as if nothing changes in these temporary, temporal buildings, despite the progress of the outside world. In the kitchen, silent and unexplained, something overflows with towers of foam. “Every event detaches itself from the background noise of all the events it might have been,” says the philosopher Brian Massumi, “ … It’s not just about the causes of what’s happened. It’s as much about the consistency of the might-have-been – the background of potential that events cut away from.”16 What strikes me (you), as I watch the film for a second time and return, again, to the swagger of its opening story, is how American Soup sings and dances its distance from the predictions of its origins: the threat of violent conflict, the obsolescence of the pre-fab; indeed, the entire concept of the progress of a history that implies an ‘after’ and a ‘before.’ It is improbable that the pre-fabs were built, improbable that they are still standing; improbable that the dinner parties take place; improbable that the FRAC’s artworks are there; improbable that the kitchen will flood; improbable that it won’t; improbable that this suburban normality could emerge from the bombastic (hi)story of war. All these improbabilities fold in and out of each other, like the sides of an accordion playing a never-ending tune. Real and not real, accurate and playful, what happens and what-might-have-been.

15. Jordi Colomer was commissioned by the FRAC BN, part of the nationwide 30 years of FRAC celebrations. His film and installation then toured to the 30 Years of FRAC at Les Abattoires, Toulouse and Pôle Image Haute-Normandie. 16. Brian Massumi and Adrian Heathfield, Movements of Thought (Performance Matters,London, 2013)p. 7 28

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The projects collected under the theme Aftermath are linked in my travels and simultaneous in my memory: Brighton, Norwich, Caen and Calais. I visit or read and remember all that I can, travelling on a narrative of intent supplied, retrospectively, by the unity of the theme. Do you remember sitting on the old battlements in Calais, watching ferries arrive, colossus after sighing colossus, heaving their heavy frames into the dock? You look down to write and when you look up, some minutes later, the ferries have vanished: enveloped by the fog, returned to the sea, or just forgotten. The artworks, their contexts and their landscapes weave their connections through my body, sedimenting a mental travelogue in which times and places merge. Aftermath is not just a series of artworks and events, but an overarching aestheticisation of the experiences in and between them all. In the undercroft beneath the war memorial in Norwich, do you remember seeing a rack of flags strung on an industrial line? Each flag is overlaid with camouflage, the national symbol rendered at once unknowable and unspeakably true. I (you) do not see everything in the Aftermath programme. I (you) miss some events because of time, or illness, or the death of my grandfather, whose voice nevertheless travels with me, retelling stories of the Second World War. I (you) take notes of everything I see and imagine everything that I do not. I’m not sure I could tell you, now, the difference between what I remember and what I (you) have imagined. In UN Camouflage (2012) the collective Société Réaliste transforms all 93 of the UN Member state’s national symbols into military paraphernalia. Established in the wake of World War Two, the UN is designed to ensure no such conflict happens again. But these casual, camouflaged forms, so recognisable and at once so strange, question the legacy of its peaceful intentions. They imagine, instead, the memory of the violence that brought it into being.

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Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, (like caltrops spinning on wire, like bodies in perpetual motion, like the improbable folded into the improbable, like the object flung into imagination …) in a perpetual motion of potential. This is sympathy: “It’s a state of the world at a point of rupture and discontinuity – when the dust settles, things will be different. “(27)

“To translate ‘faithfully’, as if there were a one-toone correspondence between words in different languages, is just a rigorous way of falsifying,”17 says the philosopher, Brian Massumi. In English, ‘aftermath’ suggests an origin; it implies an other which came before. It motions towards a beginning, and even to use the word is to affect the origin that justifies the idea. “The body will be cold to touch, like a cold hand on a cold day. And that can be quite a shock to people.” In Jordan Baseman’s film A Cold Hand on a Cold Day (2013), the foremath is life; the aftermath is death. The film shows footage of flickering clouds alongside the voice of a funeral director, describing the preparation of a corpse for burial. In this context, what comes after is an attempt to return to the time of before. It is a movement towards life, in death. It is a movement made by and on behalf of the living. “If mouths are really, really open … we do sometimes put a suture in, from my embalming days.”18 The material has been manhandled, like a dead body. The film does not show the funeral director’s face but only her voice. Her voice is attended by the haunting cries of sea gulls and the scudding clouds of a fast moving sky. The sky is ruptured by scratches and holes – wounds of the process of the film’s development, manufactured by hand. The words of the funeral director, Cara Mair, are edited to seventeen minutes, from several hours of conversation.

17. Brian Massumi Ibid., p. 1 18. Jordan Baseman, A Cold Hand on a Cold Day (2013), shown at Fabric, 5th October – 24th October 2013 32

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There are 70,000 words shared across the English and French languages, a direct result of the Norman invasion of England in 1066. This legacy of war speaks of the kinship of its aftermath. Monument. Remembrance. Imagine. Some of the words we share still have the same meaning, others have meandered apart. Spectre. Disappear.

In Calais, the Museum of Memory 1939-1945 occupies a bunker in the middle of a park. It is claustrophobic, cold, damp, and very full: rows of photocopied photographs of Resistance fighters, racks of guns and daggers, maps of strategic plans illustrated with French flags and Nazi insignia. It reminds me, fondly, of my childhood – of afternoons spent trailing my grandparents round similar museums, as they told me stories from their lives in the Second World War: stories that were not just part of history, but defining features of their identity. There is a distinction between memory – as a trace of the past – and remembering – as the action that retrieves it; just like there is a difference between an archive and a monument. Just like there is a difference between the concrete cave of the Museum of Memory in Calais, and, a few hundred yards away, the cool interior of the Monument exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. On the bridge approaching Calais town hall, I momentarily misrecognise an old man as my grandfather. He has a cane and a wide brimmed hat, but in fact he is only as old as my grandfather was when I was a girl. In fact, he is twenty years too young to have fought in the war. In fact, the Second World War is slipping out of living memory.

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The structure of the Time and Place project is collective, and Aftermath was part of a wider collective model – a collaboration between five organizations on either side of the Channel. Accordingly, the Monument exhibitions, held in Caen, Norwich and Calais, follow the same pattern, collaborative not only in theme but also in method. As the exhibition publication said, “The word Monument exists in parallel and in almost the same senses in English and French.”1 The Time and Place partners shared an open call to artists, each participated in the selection process, and some of the artwork travelled between venues.

1. Revue, p. 7 35

Djamal Kokene curves barbed wire into a large, glossy ball.19 Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet curve versions of monuments that have been destroyed, out of soap.20 Virginie Maillard sticks neon signs atop old war bunkers: GIRLS, COFFEE SHOP, MARRIAGE CENTER.21 These contradictions between material and purpose generate impossible objects. How was the ball made? How will the sculptures survive? How can the architecture of war sustain its new purpose? The affect they have is bodily. “The reason to say ‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’” says Massumi, “is that affect carries a bodily connotation.”22 Affect is the reaction to someone else’s anger before you have felt their punch, the pain of a razor’s edge before it tears your skin, the smell of a damp and claustrophobic bunker before you have entered the building. In a world of objects made strange by their materials, where do you feel safe? Deep in the forest, man-made, wooden structures look like they will topple if I approach. Shelter, Mark Edwards calls his light box photographs of architectural piles of firewood; but if you seek them out for comfort, you will soon find yourself in flames.23 In Laurent Sfar’s models, suburban houses are imprisoned by their own desire for safety. Built into the ground like bunkers, these homes (dis)appear to be under constant threat.24 Is this material substitution the means by which the future, can recognise danger? Are we an audience inured by the familiarity of the local cenotaph, and is this how we resurrect the terror of a treacherous past?

19. Djamal Kokene Ligne de fruite (2010) Jordi Colomer, American Soup (2013 20. Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet Soap Sculpture (series, 2013) 21. Valerie Maillard, Anamnesis Land (series) 22. Massumi, Ibid., p. 28 23. Mark Edwards Shelter (series, 2014) 24. Laurent Sfar, Modèle Ile de France, 2000 – 2008 36

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Meaning is a redrafting of the past, excavated with the tools of the future. Language is one of those tools – albeit a twisted instrument, full of holes and absences and the ambivalence of translation. It travels in time, remembering the past, imagining the future, forgetting to mention the words that fall outside the story.

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 39

To use the word ‘aftermath’ is to suggest a starting point, an originary truth, and once I have given the word to Jordan Baseman’s enigmatic film, I have started to look for a beginning. (Such is the power of language that to use the word is to change the nature of the origin that calls it into being.) This must be how the artist felt when he said A Cold Hand on a Cold Day “was made to be here” – here being the church building that is Fabrica art gallery, its vaulted ceiling the main exhibition space, its walls hung with memorials to parish members killed in the two World Wars. There are “layers of potency,” Baseman says, “because of the history of the building and its former use.”25 Just as A Cold Hand on a Cold Day motions towards lives that can be remembered but not renewed, so the architecture of Fabrica motions towards faith that can be felt, but not explained. The building asks you to speak in hushed tones, to walk close to the walls before daring to enter the soaring centre of its vaulted hall. It adds a hallowed tone to the matter-of-fact voice, the invisible speaker, the material breakdown of Baseman’s film. The potency of the building lies in its own elusive origins, acting on the unrecoverable foremath of the artist’s work.

There is a distinction between memory – as a trace of the past – and remembering – as the action that retrieves it. This is what Henri Bergson describes as ‘the movement of memory at work’ and, writes the philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, “It carries memory back so to speak into a region of presence similar to that of perception.”26 You find yourself looking at a series of large, black pictures scarred with faint white lines, in the basement floor of The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Your gaze is lost in the dark abyss of each print, until you start to see your own reflection in the glass. The harder you look, the less you can see. Perhaps the mistake is to imagine looking will help you see at all.

25. Talking Point: A Cold Hand on a Cold Day, film by Ben Harding for Fabrica, 2013 26. Paul Ricoeur, Memories and Images (2004), reprodued in Ian Farr, ed. Memory (Whitechapel Gallery, London & MIT Press, Massachussetts, 2012), p 68 40

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I (you) do not see. I (you) miss things. I (you) imagine. I’m (you’re) not sure I (you) could tell you (me), now, the difference between what I (you) remember and what I (you) have imagined.

Memory is like an expanse of terrain – it does not just exist, it must be traversed. And each journey involves a decision about where to go: which aspects of memory to remember, and which to forget. Forgetting, is the route-map for memory. And if a monument is a type of collective memory, it is also a type of communal forgetting.

These images, the wall text tells you, are The Day Before – Star System - Series by Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil (2004): reproductions of stellar constellations above Dresden (1945), New York (2001) and Baghdad (1991 and 2003). They are digital recreations of the night sky, hours before a violent attack. You search the imagined skies for some knowledge of what daylight will bring. But instead of a warning, you find a series of plotted stars – far away light, at once visible to millions of people, and dead long before it appears. You find a memory reconstructed by a computer, an imagined version of a truth whose meaning only emerges in retrospect. The harder you look, the less you can see. AugusteDormeuil’s pictures fail to predict the future, and defy the idea that knowledge moves forwards from the past. Meaning, it is clear, moves in the other direction. It is only in retrospect, of course, that these images of the sky exist at all.

In the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Calais, a triptych of photographs hangs in a small, black room. Each image in Monument I, II, III by Valérie Collart (2010) is the same: a black and white picture of a war memorial that stands by the side of the road: a list of names carved into stone, familiar and similar to other war memorials in towns across Europe.27 (Imagine for a moment how Europe looked before the first world war: no electricity wires, no motorways, no supermarkets, no monuments to a generation of the dead). There is a relationship, says the historian Pierre Nora, between the rise of technologies that record audio-visual data, and a crisis in meaning. As the archive expands, it becomes harder to tell the difference between what is significant and what is not. Our tools provide us with the traces of memory, but not with the means to remember, and as a result, we are left abandoned in time: floating, lost, unable to find our roots in the past or our routes to the future.

27. Valérie Collart Monument I, II, III (2010) 42

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Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, (like caltrops spinning on wire, like bodies in perpetual motion, like the improbable folded into the improbable, like an object flung into imagination …) in a perpetual motion of potential. This is the difference between a monument and an artwork –between the concrete cave of the Museum of Memory in Calais, and, a few hundred yards away, the cool interior of the Monument exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

The memorial in Collard’s triptych is hidden behind young trees, and one tree has been scratched away, as if to reveal the sculpture it hides. But these are photographs. The scratching simply exposes the fiery copper beneath the surface of the photographic plate. “Just as the future – once a visible, predictable, manipulable, well-marked extension of the present – has come to seem invisible, so we have gone from the idea of a visible past to one of an invisible past.”28 The harder you look, the less you can see.

Apply it, aftermath, this word that exists in English but not in French, to the visceral, twisting forms of Jean Roulland’s sculpture, and watch his half-human, halfmythic figures writhe in a new relationship with time. In the presence of the concept ‘aftermath’, Roulland’s Afghan Woman (1998) does not simply lean forward, her body elongated with the movement of her will, yearning for a continuity that is at odds with the heaviness of her metallic form; she also seems to escape something – the weight of the bronze, the horrific inevitability of matter that curves her spine and buries her feet; or the will of the artist, perhaps, whose thumb prints mark out her eyes in a simultaneous act of blinding and envision. Perhaps she is caught in a perpetual motion of escape, a run from an unknowable foremath – the origins on which the aftermath relies, the origins that the word has itself called into being.

Tom Molloy turns 89 picture frames to the wall. You will not see these photographs of British soldiers, who died fighting in ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan; you will not be able to pretend that their faces reveal the substance of their lives.29 Renaud AugusteDormeuil makes digital images of historical night skies;

28. Pierre Nora Lieux de Memoire (1984), reproduced in Farr, ed., p. 65 29. Tom Molloy Operation (2013) 44

The purpose of a monument is to be collective. Derived from the Latin route monere: ‘to remind or to warn,’2 a monument is both a symbol of public memory, and a public symbol of a memorialised past. It is the action that makes it possible to replace ‘I know’ or ‘you saw’ with ‘we remember.’ A monument is not a trace of the past, but a way of remembering it; or in other words, it is not the terrain of the past, but a map drawn with the patterns of forgetting.

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Memory is like an expanse of terrain – it does not just exist, it must be traversed. And each journey involves a decision about where to go: what to remember, what to forget, what you will say really happened, and what you imagine might have been.

2. Monument, Revue 1, april 2014, Veronica Sekules, p. 19 45

you will not read the tragic future in these stars.30 Valerie Collart claws at branches to find the trace hidden behind the photograph; you will not see beyond the ruined material of the picture surface.31 Do you still equate looking with knowledge? Do you still think that, if something is visible, then it is real? When was the last time you looked at the war memorial in your town centre? When was the last time you read its solemn roll call of names? How do you imagine the lives it claims to remember? How do you know what came before?

A small, neat grid of pictures beckons me close. Contact (2010) by Tom Molloy looks like a contact sheet of photographic negatives and, as I peer at its contents, casts me in the role of editor, choosing which frame to use.32 The grid is populated with photographs of war. The emaciated bodies of Auschwitz victims. The mushroom cloud above Hiroshima. A naked child, mouth locked in a scream, running from Agent Orange. The photographs are famous. I have seen each one a thousand times before, ripped out of context, a floating metonym for human suffering, reprinted and reproduced as the monument to an unspeakable past. I hear footsteps approaching the small back room in the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Whoever it is does not come in. Perhaps she senses I don’t want company. Perhaps she can tell the photographs demand an audience of one. The purpose of a monument is to be collective. Derived from the Latin route monere: ‘to remind or to warn,’33 a monument is both a symbol of public memory, and a public symbol of a memorialised past. Like the geometry of the Normandy cemeteries for soldiers who died in the First World War, writes the ethnologist Marc Augé, a monument is not a trace of the past, but a way of remembering it. The Normandy

30. Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil The Day Before – Star System - Series (2004) 31. Valérie Collart Monument I, II, III (2010) 32. Tom Molloy Contact (2010) 33. Monument Revue, p. 19 http://issuu.com/timeandplace/docs/monument-en, accessed 1st January 2015 46

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 49

cemeteries transform the chaos of war into a pattern that plots a path for collective remembering.34 Contact is an anti-monument: it distances its images from the truth of their individual origins without plotting the map of a communal return. Transformed into a contact sheet, it is not the images themselves that are horrific in this tidy grid; it is the way I am meant to look at them. Mechanised and reduced, they appear as interchangeable blocks of content, awaiting my callous judgement. And it must be mine: the scale of this work means it’s for my eyes alone, while the apparent objectivity of the grid gives me sole interpretive responsibility. These scenes, at once recognisable to millions of people, and long gone before anyone can bear witness, are lined up like lessons never learnt. They hint at, “the fundamental vulnerability of memory” (in Ricoeur’s words), “which results from the relation between the absence of the thing remembered and its presence in the mode of representation.”35 The callous pattern of the contact sheet does not help me remember, but presumes I will forget.

Inside the Museum of Memory 1939-45 in Calais, material is kept rather than displayed – one cabinet is so full of knives and daggers that they bury each other, sharpened tips rising above plastic handles like drowning men. When I return to the Musée des Beaux-Arts I look for Escape Map (2013) by Carole Fékété.36 Earlier, the artist had shown me to the Museum of Memory where she found the scarf – a real souvenir from the British air force. Parachuted into occupied France, British airmen were meant to use the maps printed onto their scarves to find their way to safety. Inside the Museum of Memory, identical mannequins wear different uniforms; French, British, German soldiers,

34. Marc Augé Oblivion, translated by Marjolin de Jager, (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004), p. 88 35. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, 2006), pp. 57-58 36. Carole Fékété Escape Map (2013) 50

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In English, ‘aftermath’ suggests an origin; it implies an other which came before. It motions towards a beginning, and even to use the word is to affect the origin that justifies the idea. The projects collected under the theme Aftermath are linked in your travels and simultaneous in your memory: Brighton, Norwich, Caen and Calais. You visit or read or imagine all that you can, travelling on a narrative of intent supplied, retrospectively, by the unity of a theme, a starting point you will never find. Aftermath suspends you in motion. It means the unknowable, the unspoken and the yet to be seen.

startlingly indistinguishable, apart from a detail on each lapel. One room contains VHS boxes of feature films made about the war, as if its fictions can be contained in a single cell. Fékété’s lifesize print of the scarf is hung in the centre of a black wall in the modernist calm of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. The photograph captures every crease of the fragile relic, every modulation of white, cream and pale pink. Mounted and framed, the picture recalls more ceremonial types of map, displayed as symbols of territory and power; and it recalls the history of landscape painting: another type of ownership, made for the gaze of occupation, wealth or holy supervision. The Museum of Memory holds traces of the real in its Perspex boxes, and assumes I have the maps to navigate its terrain. It is an archive without interpretation. (I summon up a story from my grandfather, asking his help to travel to the past.) Fékété’s photograph is both a trace of the real, and a context for it. In the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Escape Map is not just a map scored with the scars of a hostile landscape – in fact, it is not yet a map of a hostile landscape. Instead, it is an object demanding a particular type of attention; a story beginning to be told: a narrative woven from the ontology of the relic, the ideology of the photograph, the symbolism of maps and the history of landscape painting. Suspended in the midst of these stories, the map vibrates with ideas it may or may not contain. This is the transition from object to artwork, and it assumes nothing, but the potential for meaning.

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 53

Recollection, says the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is the action of putting pure-memory into images. It annexes the past in a movement related to imagination; which, (in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words) is “… magic alone. [The act of imagination] is an incantation destined to produce the object of one’s thoughts, the thing one desires, in a manner that one can take possession of it.”37 You recollect your grandfather’s face as clearly as you imagine people laughing in the twisted russet shapes of Michel Aubry’s installations: Tables (19142003) and Lustre [Chandelier] (1914-2002).38 The sculptures are large constructions made from the rusted, metal remains of equipment that Aubry found buried in World War One battlefields, alongside the spades and sticks he used to dig them from the ground. Affect is what happens at the “semblance” of an event, when meaning is still potential, perception is still in motion, and memory, knowledge and sensation intermingle, repeat and suggest. Here, it is impossible or at least unnecessary to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, between what the objects remember and what they pretend. Layers of potency shroud the reality of the memory-trace, to inspire the magic of the imagination. A bucket lies warped and twisted in an impossible promise of softness – wounded with holes, a parody of its proper function. Meanwhile, the bucket’s oxidized skin oozes with a golden sheen, as if summoning the spirits of precious metals. Gathered here in disarray, the injured objects of war generate a kind of ceremonial gaiety. The installation creates ghostly bodies that are so real, they invade my senses. I imagine the sound of a soldier’s exploding scream. I hear the chiming laughter of a roomful of drunken revellers.

37. Farr, Ibid., p. 68 38. Michel Aubry Tables (1914 – 2003) and Lustre [Chandelier] (1914 – 2002) 54

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Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, (like a figure emerging from nothing, like a chime resonating from a repurposed bomb, like a collection of photographs that cannot be seen …) in a perpetual motion of potential. It is impossible to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, between what the objects remember and what they pretend. Layers of potency shroud the reality of the memory-trace in order to inspire the magic of the imagination.

The scream, the laugh, the weapons, the feast. The affect of the work emerges amidst this chatter of alternate worlds, churned together in a cacophony of simultaneous time.

“Tell me what you forget,” says the ethnographer Marc Augé, “and I will tell you who you are.”39 Memory is like an expanse of terrain – it does not just exist, it must be traversed. And each journey involves a decision about where to go: which aspects of memory to remember, and which to forget. Forgetting, then, is the route-map for memory. And if a monument is a type of collective memory, then it is also a type of communal forgetting. Antoine Durand’s collection of 1,000 postcards show pacifist monuments built to commemorate the First and Second World Wars.40 They are displayed discreetly in both the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, and the Musée des BeauxArts in Calais: a pile of six designs, with an instruction to visitors to take a handful away. As I tuck them into my notebook I realize, for the first time, that all the war memorials I remember honour soldiers – consistent tributes to a military death. Interrogate memory. Is this true? Or do you just associate the cenotaph, the regional memorial, the solemn roll of names carved into stone, with the ceremonies of remembrance organised by the military? It is neither and both. Of thirty thousand war memorials in France, only a dozen stand for peace.41 (Imagine for a moment how Europe looked before the first world war: no electricity wires, no motorways, no supermarkets, no monuments to a generation of the dead). The narrative of these familiar monuments is dominated, in other words, by the intention of war: a directional story that cultivates both the tragedy of individuals who died for their country (World War One), and the moral authority of the Allies that defeated Hitler (World War Two).

39. Augé, Ibid, p. 18 40. Antone Durand Cursed be war and its perpetrators(2013) 41. Monument Revue, p.117 56

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Did you take notes of everything you saw and imagine everything you did not? Could you tell me, now, the difference between what you remember and what you have imagined? The purpose of a monument is to be collective. Derived from the Latin route monere: ‘to remind or to warn,’ � a monument is both a symbol of public memory, and a public symbol of a memorialised past. It is the action that makes it possible to replace ‘I know’ or ‘you saw’ with ‘we remember.’ A monument is not a trace of the past, but a way of remembering it; or in other words, it is not the terrain of the past, but a map drawn with the patterns of forgetting.

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3. Monument Revue, p. 19 57

There is a difference between a memory-trace and the journey of remembering, and the purpose of a monument is to make it possible for publics to remember together. But the further you travel from personal experience, the further you must go in order to find its trace. Durand’s postcards, primed to enter new systems of exchange, do not remember the war so much as they draw attention to the way we remember. “In these photographs,” he says, “my aim is to pay tribute to those elected officials of the early twentieth century” who were brave enough to erect a different kind of memorial.”42 Such is the problem with monuments. They are compelled to transform private memories into public meaning, to “commemorate now and always.”43 But how do they know the paths of remembering the future will take? How can they decide what we will need to forget?

Do you still equate looking with knowledge? Do you still think that something must be visible, in order to be real? I (we) meet the artist Jan Lemitz in a café in London. We share stories about the Eurostar, how it rolls out of Calais at 14:09 and arrives in London at 14:09, too. He tells me (us) about the history of the Channel Tunnel, celebrating its twentieth year beneath the sea, and the history of the first flight across the same stretch of water, which took place a century ago. I (we) do not see everything in the Aftermath programme. I (we) miss some events because of time, illness, or death. Voices nevertheless travel with me (us), retelling stories that we have heard before. We take notes of everything we see and imagine everything we do not. We’re not sure we could tell the difference between what we see, what we imagine and what we have remembered.

42. Ibid. 43. Ricoeur (2004), p. 89 58

Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, in a perpetual motion of potential. This is the radical possibility of change within perpetual movements of meaning.

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Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, (like a map that is not yet a map, like a weapon softened to a feast, like an actor moving between characters …) in a perpetual motion of potential. Change comes in the form of repetition, or more accurately, in the gaps that emerge in repetition. Change comes in the perpetual motion of potential, in the moments before meaning is defined. On the day of the referendum, when our country might be torn in two, we visit the Museum of Memory, and see a man who looks like our grandfather. He makes us remember the war.

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Jan Lemitz Innocent Passages 2014 61

Lemitz is traversing the waters, back and forth, by boat, by train, by plane, taking photographs of his journey and finding photographs of the histories of the terrain.44 He shows us pictures of the aircraft hangar built for the first plane to fly across the Channel. He shows pictures of the hanger transformed into a detention centre for the migrants who flock to France’s borders. He shows pictures of the ceremonial destruction of the detention centre. He says its destruction has not stopped the migrants from coming. Change comes in the form of repetition, or more accurately, in the gaps that emerge in repetition. Change comes in the perpetual motion of potential, in the moments before meaning is defined. Pictures of parties to mark the opening of the Channel Tunnel contrast with the modest celebrations taking place in its twentieth year. The triumph of the twin-engined flight across the Channel is soured by pictures of migrants trying to make the same journey – transformed into a feat of politics, not engineering.

A group of slow moving people is a family, an army, a boat lost at sea and a group of slow moving people. In Jocelyn Cottencin’s film Monumental (2013)45, actors move between tableaux vivants of monuments from Caen, Calais, Norwich and Brighton. The arrangements are famous, or at least their languages are: arms raised in triumph, heads proud in victory. I have seen their like a thousand times before, ripped out of context, floating metonyms for human accomplishment. The actors never stop moving, so I anticipate each tableau before it arrives, and see

44. Jan Lemitz, Artist in Residence at Fabrica, 2014-2015 www.innocentpassages.org, accessed 1st January 2015 45. Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental (2013) 62

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its shadows long after it has gone. The semblance of an event, according to Brian Massumi, is the vibration of potential that exists before meaning is defined.46 It is a quality of the outside world, but it is manifest within individual perception: “an immediate, active grasp – of what may come of the event on all sides.” The semblance of an event is the feeling that the group of people is a family, an army, a boat lost at sea and the shadows and the signals of everything in-between. Like the language of the public monument, the semblance of an event is communal. But unlike the language of the monument, it consists of ideas and feelings that emerge without definition. “You’re not just thinking-feeling it from your point of view. … You’re not in your subject position, you’re becoming.”47 You anticipate the familiar forms and you watch their shadows linger. It is not just the shapes of the tableau that change, but the actors themselves: their stoic faces and nondescript clothes become kings and martyrs, gowns and rags. Art explodes meaning and leaves it suspended, like bodies slowly transforming into sculptures, in a perpetual motion of potential. The longer you watch, the more you recognise the shapes of what has been or will become. These are not just monuments. In fact, they are not yet monuments. And you, watching, are not yet a viewer gazing upon a sculpture, but a subject caught in motion, too. This is what Massumi calls sympathy: “It’s a state of the world at a point of rupture and discontinuity – when the dust settles, things will be different.“48

46. Massumi, Ibid., p. 23 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., p. 27 64

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Antoine Huet

The above photograph was taken sometime in the year 2000 by George Plunkett1 (1913-2006), a photographer with a passion for the changes in his native city of Norwich, which he painstakingly documented from 1931 to his death in 2006. The hundreds of photographs available on his internet site2 give a clear impression of the radical changes that took place in

1. Il fit parti de la Norfolk and Norwich Archeological Society à partir de 1935 et publia par ce biais, de nombreux articles sur l’histoire de l’architecture du Norfolk et de Norwich en particulier. 2. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Website/index.htm 66

the city throughout the 20th century. At the same time, they offer a subtle comment on the great historical events that left their mark on the century, as well as on the urban development schemes they brought in their wake.

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This text, written during the prolongation of the Monument exhibitions in Norwich, aims to link this photograph by George Plunkett – or more precisely, the emergence of the sculpture it depicts – to a selection of three works shown as part of Monument.

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A priori, this photograph does not possess any great artistic interest. The foreground shows a kind of cement post vaguely reminiscent of the tail fins of a bomb. In the left middle distance, two building cranes appear to suggest that construction work is going on; the spire of St. Peter Mancroft Church to the right enables the viewer to locate more precisely where the photograph was taken from. In the far distance, the iconic tower of Norwich City Hall leaves no doubt as to where the photograph was taken. The photograph’s title, Malthouse Rd Car Park Bomb Sculpture confirms the location of the image, and offers clues as to the nature of the concrete sculpture shown in the foreground. The sub-title, The scene of great devastation caused by the air raids of 1942, is an apparent reference to a tragic event caused by the Second World War German bombing raids. This collection of intriguing clues arouses our curiosity and augments the fantastic aspect of this image, showing a concrete sculpture that represents in very minimal fashion the appearance of a bomb on a car park roof. After a lengthy search through the archives available on the web, the history of this object slowly emerges. The concrete statue progressively frees itself from the silence in which the minimal form of its casing was fixed one day in 1966 or 1967 when the top floor of the Malthouse car park was laid. The building, commissioned by the City of Norwich, was inaugurated in 1967, and was the first multi-storey car park in the city. In 1965, the analytical philosopher Richard Wollheim was one of the very first to employ the term ‘Minimal Art’ in an article published in Arts Magazine, where he describes the procedures used by one tendency in American art, just then 67

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1 Malthouse Rd car park bomb sculpture, 2000-03-01 The scene of great devastation caused by the air raids of 1942.

2 John Cornu Assis sur l’obstacle 69

beginning to be recognised (Wollheim 1995: 387-399). As a result of their reflections on the onthology of works of art, the artists labelled as minimalist argued for a stripping down of form, and a certain neutrality. They worked with basic raw materials (steel, wood, paint) that they transformed in simple, often geometrical structures. The ultimate form of the work was commonly a product of the qualities of the material used, and its stark simplicity was the ultimate stage before its disappearance. Whilst not seeking to suggest any causal relation, it is interesting to note that the form and structure of the sculpture on the roof of the Malthouse car park contains echoes of some of the characteristics of the work of the minimalist artists of the time. Firstly, the sculpture is part of the prolongation of a concrete post that is holding up the horizontal struts. It is the overall structure of the building, lined with countless posts of this kind that created the shape of the sculpture. The procedure leading to the creation of this sculpture is worthy of mention, as it recalls for example the painter Frank Stella, in whose work the shape of the frame and therefore of the canvas determined his brush strokes, and also therefore the forms painted on that canvas. In addition, at the Malthouse car park the concrete is left untreated, and simple geometrical shapes (triangle, rectangle and square) are employed to structure the sculpture. However, this is where the comparison between minimal art and this concrete sculpture ends, because even if the intention behind this monument remains unknown, it seems obvious that it was meant to represent a bomb. The artist John Cornu had quite a different intention when he made the nine sculptures of his work Sitting on the Fence, on show in the Undercroft in Norwich from 14th June to the 24th August 2014. Despite his connections to his minimalist peers, he here questions the supposed neutrality of basic forms and untreated materials by placing his sculptures at the intersection of a multitude of reference points, thus bordering on polysemy. Formal echoes between these nine sculptures and the obstacles placed on landing beaches, Christian crosses, or even gibbets, are possible without ever being essential. In addition, the title of the work refers us back to the neutrality of a position, or rather to the inability to choose between two positions. 70

To return to the concrete sculpture on the Malthouse car park, the choice has been made: it definitely represents the tail fin of a bomb, plunged into the car park roof. What could be stranger?

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booklet A year after the United Kingdom and France declared war n°1 on Germany, Norwich was bombed by the German airforce. In his account of the bombardments3, the photographer George Plunkett dates the 19th September 1940 as the day when a bomb fell in Theatre Street, only a few hundred meters from the spot where the Malthouise multi-storey car park would later be built. Fortunately, the bomb did not explode, but it was so deeply buried in the ground that it took all day to remove it. Other searches were carried out at the time in Norwich, as local inhabitants spoke of another bomb that fell without exploding.

Twenty years later, on the 23rd October 1964, a local newspaper carried a report on an incident that occurred during the earthworks carried out the site chosen for the construction of the car park. While the diggers were busy excavating the foundations of the new building, work was suddenly halted following the discovery of a Second World War bomb. Mr George Swain, the Home Office photographer during the war, was interviewed by a journalist, and remembered the 19th September 1940 incident, as well as a photograph that was taken while the bomb was being removed. He also told the journalist that during this incident some locals reported having heard two bombs fall, but that only one of them was discovered. Apparently it took twenty-four years for this second one to be found, on the site of the new car park. It is therefore only a short step to connect these anecdotes and the fantastic emergence of this concrete bomb on the roof of the Malthouse car park. Moreover, on 28th February 2000, a few years before the demolition of the car park, the Norwich Evening News journalist Derek James, linked the two events and called for anyone who could help give details that would explain the circumstances that led to the creation of the sculpture. Library archives had revealed nothing about it, and neither the

3. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Website/raids.htm 71

city council nor the Norwich Society were able to offer any help. James concluded his article by suggesting that it was an initiative by the architect, who, remembering the 1940 bombing, wanted to pay homage to the soldiers who risked their lives to dispose of the bomb by raising this concrete monument. Since the sculpture is not mentioned in any archive or plan, it seems very likely that it was the result of decisions taken on site, in the heat of the building work. The discovery of the unexploded bomb when the foundation work was going on was apparently the trigger that helped some deeply buried war memories emerge. Thanks to an individual or a group, the idea of marking this memory must have emerged during the construction of the car park, and thus it avoided all administrative and political planning, which explains the lack of any archive material. These suppositions and speculations are reminiscent of the work by Maya Balcioglu and Stuart Brisley, The Cenotaph project, on show at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts from 29th March to 24th August 2014. Both projects draw attention to the subversive potential of phenomena arising outside the usual administrative channels, for good or ill. We know from history that if the Cenotaph in Whitehall created by Edwin Lutyens in 1920 is now a giant stone monument more than ten meters high in the centre of Whitehall Avenue in London, this is the result of popular patriotic fervor following the victory parade of 19th July 1919. The original wood and plaster structure was a temporary one, and was taken down. However, such was the popular outcry that the authorities of the day decided to make the Cenotaph a permanent reminder, and commissioned a stone monument from Edwin Lutyens. When, eighty years later in 1987, Stuart Brisley, then artist-inresidence at the Imperial War Museum in London, decided to reproduce the same monument at one-fifth of its original size, his aim was to restore its human dimensions. ďż˝Brought back to a human scale, he and Maya Balcioglu, who had joined him in the project, found they needed to accompany their displays of the cenotaph models with public debates that questioned the collective processes thanks to which monuments emerge.

Nowadays, the only remaining trace of the sculpture on the roof of the Malthouse car park is the black-and-white image produced by the photographer George Plunkett. This is EDIbecause, after almost forty years of good and loyal service, the TION N°3 Malthouse car park and its sculpture were pulled down to make FEBRUARY 2015 booklet way for the Chapelfield Shopping Centre, begun in 2005. It is n°1 as if this multi-story car park, a symbol of economic revival after the war and of the arrival of the consumer society in the mid1960s, had for nearly forty years assumed the heavy responsibility of displaying on its roof, and in sight of everyone, memories of a traumatic event that had been buried deep underground. The subtitle of George Plunkett’s photograph, The scene of great devastation caused by the air raids of 1942, takes us back not to the accounts of the 1940 raid, but the more devastating ones that took place in 1942. This adds a wider and more symbolic dimension to the monument. All of this makes the Malthouse car park sculpture emblematic: a small story in the big story of History. It would also have fitted in well into the series of Soap Sculptures by the artists Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet, exhibited at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts from the 29th March to 24th August 2014. The series of Soap Sculptures was a miniature representation of monuments taken down, destroyed, or moved as a result of collective demands, political decisions, or regime change. Antoine Huet

Maya Balcioglu and Stuart Brisley 1 The Cenotaph Project 1987â&#x20AC;&#x201C;91, MDF, 222.3 x 177.8 x 137.2 cm. Courtesy of the artists. 74

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Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet 2 Soap Sculpture (Emile or On Education) 2013, soap, 40 x 20 x 20 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

3 Soap Sculpture (Iron Curtain End) 2013, soap, 55 x 30 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artists. 75

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Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet Soap Sculpture (Young Obama Unwelcome Guest) 2013, soap, 55 x 30 x 30 cm. Courtesy of th artists. 77

The project TAP has been selected within the frame of the INTERREG IV A France (Channel) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; England cross-border European cooperation programme, part-financed by the ERDF.

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BOOKLET 2 -

In my first text, published in Issue 1, I discussed my relationship to this project, to imagery and to movement. This second text takes the form of a series of notes. It is an opportunity to look back over the second phase of my work on this project, and the week spent in residence at the Museum of Dance where we produced a first version of the performance piece.

Monumental takes as its structural reference points monuments, statues, public artworks, architecture and memorials. Monumental addresses questions of representation not by fabricating images but by imagining forms which evoke and conjure up images. The narrative is not defined in advance, but emerges through the manifestation of these forms. What I want to do is to evoke an image by exploring its constituent parts, its content, its power. Decoding our relationship to imagery through the body and choreographed movement. What happens on stage needs to retain its sense of potentiality, its power of invention. The score, the instructions, the working protocols and the experimentation which

went into this project all combined to determine the forms which emerged. My aim is to define and create a context in which form and the imagination can develop mutually. Monumental does not exist purely in the moment of its performance, but also in the periods of preparation and warming-up where we sketch out an idea of what the piece will become. Play, the group, the community and the imagination are parameters which feed into and shape this work. During the first phase at the CND in Pantin, where we worked on producing the film, I came up with a strategy for stepping outside the role of choreographer during the first day in the studio. Everyone arrives, says hello and then the whole teams sits down around the choreographer and starts to discuss the project. That’s exactly what I was trying to avoid, but that’s naturally how it happened. When I found myself in this situation, I simply told the dancers that since everybody had been given the same information, the same images and the same explanation regarding this project, for the time being I wouldn’t say anymore. All I did was suggest a few warm-up exercises: to warm up the space, warm up the project and warm up the group. These collective warm-ups became an essential element of the project. We all warm up together. The notion of the group is also crucial here. I have already noted elsewhere that my relationship to this notion is probably indicative of my relationship to dance, since I’ve worked, collaborated and exchanged ideas with each of the performers, choreographers and dancers who make up this group in various ways over the past few years. I’m interested in who they are and the work that they do. It’s important for me that what I see in a piece of work is a reflection of the person who created it. If there is a disconnect there, too big a contrast, then the work becomes a posture and I lose interest. This isn’t an affectation, it’s essential for me. A vestige of mythology. EDITION N°3

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83 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

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85 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

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87 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

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89 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

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91 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

The live incarnation of this performance allowed me to engage more closely with ideas of framing, borders, light and narrative. The audience enters the room and there is no difference in lighting between the performance space and the seating areas. The performers are there, chatting and watching the audience come in. Once the audience are settled, I stand at the border between the audience and the stage space and do something unusual for a performance piece of this kind. I talk about Monumental, I give a few indications and I introduce the group. I name them all individually. This is the start of our narrative, our story. These are the people who will create it. The music starts. The volume is high, very high. Something by Ty Segall. The chromatically-arranged batons form a rectangle 3 metres by 6 metres. The items of clothing are spread around the border of the space, again arranged by colour. Around the space the performers dress and undress. They try on new combinations of clothes, multiple layers. Gradually they enter the rectangle, and form a circle. What I am looking for in dancers and performers is that ability to invent a new relationship to space, and to translate it visually. Each sequence is defined by a series of indications, words, rules and figures which shape the emergence and apparition of forms. Once all the performers are inside the circle, the first monument name is called out. We allow this name to ring out for a few moments, and then we begin. Generally we start with BUNKER. The order of the different sequences is changed for each ‘performance’ of Monumental. This allows us to prevent the gestures from becoming routine. Each monument is named, although not necessarily using its original title. For example, the Richard Long stone circle becomes simply ‘Richard Long’. These words are spoken clearly, so the audience can understand them. They are at once information begetting information, generating and circulating images, and an expression of the gulf between what we see and what we hear. The names may appear before the movements associated with the monument in question begin, or just after. This is to ensure that they do not announce the beginning of the action.

When I started working on this project I set out to do more than just reinterpret monuments, I also wanted to use this group to reflect on what would make a contemporary Monument, and ideally to mark the time spent working in each Monumental host city with a monument intimately linked to its context. In Rennes, I revisited this idea of the contemporary monument. We had numerous discussions focused on a number of heavy subjects: political, geostrategic, economic etc. We explored the notion of social networks and, by extension, ‘figure-based’ modes of communication: EMOJI. We thus came up with a new sequence, an Emoji monument which debuted in Rennes following the Monument sequence ‘Cathedral’. Monumental is above all a project concerned with form, the way that forms appear and what they produce. This is not a question of reproducing images, but of understanding what images are composed of in order to re-engage with them anew. This is undoubtedly one of the most important working principles of Monumental.1.

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http://www.telenantes.com/sortir/artistes-en-court/article/jocelyn-cottencin

1. performance and film Jocelyn Cottencin performers Katerina Andreou, Yaïr Barelli, Nuno Bizarro, Bryan Campbell, Ondine Cloez, Volmir Cordeiro, Matthieu Doze, Madeleine Fournier, Yves-Noël Genod, Carole Perdereau, Mickael Phelippeau, Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz residency and coproduction Musée de la danse coproduction film Musée des beaux arts de Calais, Frac Basse-Normandie, Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts (Norwich) executive production Météores Monumental has enjoyed the patronage of Média-Graphic

ÂŠÂ Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

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Yair Barelli (Israel)

creating a monument, in the flesh, in time, living. a contradiction in motion ephemeral, instantaneous representation of something which is essentially static, fixed inert often a monument is to the memory of something when the representative action is instantaneous and alive, it draws primarily on the present, the situation. becoming a monument is impossible, which is why i love trying

Bryan Campbell

(USA)

clusterfuck political-architectural-corporal

Ondine Cloez

(France)

adjectives: Grand. Together. Nude. nouns: Discreet statue. Unifying nude. Wounded gallop. Fixed colours. White bunker. Cloaked landscape.

Volmir Cordeiro (Brazil)

tatue discrète. Nu fédérateur. Galop blessé. Couleurs fixes. Bunker blanc. Paysage recouvert.

Yves Noel Genod (France)

Sorry Jocelyn... I can’t do it... I’ve got so many things going round my head at the moment... How about: “life” and “languorous”... Love, Yvno

Agnieszka Ryszkiewicz (Poland)

Coding, decoding, residues, traces, abandoned ideas, monuments crumbling away almost before they are finished… for me Monumental is like an Italo Calvino story. An invisible monument to invisible monuments. A monument is a Historical symbol. A tomb for a collective memory. Monumental is a dynamic which constantly generates new stories. It resuscitates individual and collective memories. Each monument which we embody is an opportunity to search within ourselves for physical and mental connections linked to specific recollections, to moments in our individual and collective memories. Emerging from the shadows to embody a bunker – it’s a process which is doomed to failure from the outset, but it is the process itself which matters, the stories we create as these virtual monuments are created and then broken down. All we have are our bodies, a few sticks and some coloured fabrics to evoke ideas of heroism, human tragedy and the limits of what language can express, the challenge of formulating individual visions in a collective body – a challenge whose flaws are integral to its grandeur.

Matthieu Doze

(France)

corps>accord>raccord>décor

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Mickael Phelippeau

(France)

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99 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

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101 © Jocelyn Cottencin Monumental, 2014

The purpose of this essay is to celebrate a partnership formed in the name of living art, infused with the universal mythological spirit of animals. My Wendat (Huron) nomadism, always in quest of art, inspired me to leave North America for Calais.

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I was invited by Léa Le Bricomte – an artist whose sculptural works combine indigenous and animal dimensions with images of shamans and warriors from Asia to the Americas – to take part in a collective creation. An attempt to explode the boundaries of solo performance, Planting indigenous flags took place here in Calais on 29th November 2014, a ‘closing ceremony’ of sorts for the biggest exhibition in the Monument programme. The content and setting of this performative event were not without their own significance, informed by the heritage of social sculpture and individual mythology. As we shall see, these elements serve to amplify the image of the artist celebrated in these pages. 103

What does it mean, from an Amerindian perspective, to wear one’s identity, to make it visible? Answering this question was at the heart of our action in planting indigenous American flags in Parc Richelieu in front of Calais’ Museum of Fine Art. For Algonquin First Nation tribes such as the Comanche, Apache and Cheyenne in New Mexico, the Sioux (Lakota, Dakota, Nakota) in the Great Plains, the Pekuakamiulnuatsh (Innus) of the North Coast, the Mi’kmaq on the Atlantic Coast, Iroquois tribes such as the Haudenausonnee, Kahniakenhaka (Mohawk), and my own Nation, the Wendat (Hurons) from America’s woodlands, there are certainly many distinctions between our different peoples. But, through the ages, certain syncretic symbols have risen to prominence. This is the case with flags. Furthermore, the current flags of the First Nations of North America do have roots in and affiliations with certain elements of Amerindian tradition. Their origins lie in the wampum, great strings of shell beads which were sometimes used to record geopolitical treaties. Passed down by their designated guardians, these wampum would be politically and artistically reinterpreted by each new generation. The spirit and the motifs of these wampum thus live on, both diplomatically in the universal forms of the indigenous flags adopted by our peoples in their new international configurations, but also artistically. This was the first motivation behind my coming here. In art, the concept of ‘critical mass’ is an important one. Especially when it comes to performance events and living art. By this I mean not the numerical quantity, but more the qualitative density which allows the activity to assume its full meaning, in terms of its presence and impact. It was this critical mass, this exploration of what the expressive-symbolic collective imagination of the North Amerindians represents in the 21st century, through the medium of art, which took shape in the form of a procession followed by the planting of flags in Calais’ Parc Richelieu.

Thus, in a manner which at first sight seems somewhat paradoxical in the context of the ‘closing’ of Monument, a series of exhibitions combining a certain visual iconoclasm with audacious examinations of the memories of war, this collective procession raised indigenous flags as a way of demonstrating that “the past has a bright future!”

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There were three key moments in this happening: (1) the shared consciousness of the participants, (2) the ritual performance, (3) the order in which the flags were planted.

this became palpable as the walkers slowed down when turning corners in the park. At such moments the human density of the flag-bearers, there among the tall trees, the greenery, the sun – all elements of Mother Earth’s ecosystem first and foremost, before being reduced to the status of urban adornments – fed into our awareness that our individual selves had come together as Us, united in this artistic action.

the second moment at which this ‘critical mass’ in this happening took on its full meaning was immediately after we lined up, as people of all ages from among the crowd joined with Léa and me to create what I like to call the ‘connections and passages’ of the imagination, suspended in space and time by the warm, sunny breezes of Calais. This was the moment of the ritual action, the plumes of healing, purifying smoke emanating from the offering of tobacco, lit and smoked in honour of Mother Earth. This gesture established the position of our artistic action at the outer limits of traditionalist ritual, combining political (heraldic) and spiritual (the symbolic power of the forms) dimensions and reinforcing the artistic perception of the ‘spirit of Hunters/Shamans/Warriors’ embodied in the motifs of the flags, hence the omnipresence of circular forms and the spiritual references to Animals. 105

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Alignment Warriors a. / - Warriors b., Apache, Cheyenne, Mi’gmaq Wendat - Sioux - Commanche - \PekuakaIlnuatsh The alignment of the flags had its own significance – the federating presence of the Wendat flag in the centre, flanked by the flags of the Mi’kmaq and Sioux. At either end of this line, the flags of the Mohawk Warrior Society and the Pekuakamiulnuatsh were not fixed into the soil, but held in place by standard-bearers. There were two significant motivations for this decision.

A unifying presence The Wendat (Huron) flag planted at the very centre operates on several levels of meaning: on top of the diplomatic significance of my Iroquois home, Wendake, is the even more fundamental presence of the Spirit of Mother Earth: the circle of sweet grass used in ceremonies, the water, the snow shoes and small boats used to travel across our territories, and of course the spirit of the Animals: the beaver and the bustard, but also the turtle (Yandia’wish), the bear (Yanonnien’), the stag (Oskenonton’) and the wolf (Yanariskwa), emblems of my clan found in the Yanon’chia, the traditional longhouse, and all visual components of the Wendat emblem. Here again the political and sacred dimensions sit side by side, uniting the two sides of the Atlantic. The flag of my Nation, the Wendat (Hurons), is a federating, unifying presence, a role assigned to my Nation since time immemorial within the Iroquois Confederation of the Seven Fires.

The honour guard To the right of the Wendat flag stood the proud standard of the Mi’kmaq, one of the Ten First Nations of Kébec whose people live on the Gaspé peninsula. Like many coastal peoples, not least the people of Calais, the Mi’kmaq are seafarers. The presence of their flag here marked the conclusion of the three-year (2012-2014) Mawita’jig scheme (Offerings, Shared Territories and Equitable Living), a collaborative art project bringing together the Native American, Acadian and Anglophone and Francophone Quebecois communities of Chaleur Bay. One of the most politically and artistically significant moments of the whole project, which actually occurred twice, was the raising of the Mi’kmaq flag on the flagpole of Carleton-sur-Mer’s City Hall, in place of the official flag of Québec. The Amerindian history of an Amerindian flag, represented here in the park in front of Calais’ Museum of Fine Art.

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Immediately to the left of the Wendat flag was the flag of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate Sioux, the Confederation of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota tribes. Next came the flag of the Comanche, while on the right, after the flag of the Mi’kmaq, came the standards of the Cheyenne Tsistsistas and the Apache (Navajo, Hopi). United here in Calais, this array of great warrior Nations was a symbolic, advance display of solidarity with the standards which two months later would lead a long horseback procession on the other side of the Atlantic, an annual tradition for the past twenty-five years. In this event, various representatives of Native American communities in the United States, led by Lakota chief Big Foot, travel 200 km from the Stanford reserve to the Pine Ridge reserve and the site known as, Wounded Knee, a sacred place where, shortly after the assassination of Sitting Bull on 15th December, the massacre of 29th December 1890 took place. Here in Calais, the priority is to enrich today’s political debates with the vivid memories of the Amerindian resistance against conquest and land appropriation, but also to further the long but essential process of healing.

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At the extremities At either end of the line-up, two flags were not planted in the soil but rather held in place by their bearers, who remained in situ. As I explained on the day, there were several strong reasons in both cases. For the Pekuakamiulnuatsh (Innu) flag of Mashteuiatsh, the incredible story of its journey to Europe more than justified its inclusion here, but also the decision not to plant it. In 1993, young Innu artist Diane Robertson, invited to contribute to the International Sculpture Symposium at St. Wendel in Germany, came up with a spectacular sculptural project entitled Voyage to the West. In the opposite direction from which the European Conquest and Christianisation arrived in the Americas (form the East), in our indigenous spiritual cosmogony, based on the circle and the four cardinal directions, exiting by the West door also means making the journey to the land of the dead, embarking on the road to the other world. A premonition? In any case Diane passed away tragically before she could complete the work. A group of close friends, myself included, decided to finish the sculpture as a posthumous tribute to Diane. And so, in the clearing of a great pine forest in St. Wendel – much like the pine forest at the heart of the Kahnesatake-Oka conflict in Kébec in 1990 – a helicopter (a mechanical metaphor for the great bustard) flew over and dropped the rolled-up flag of the Pekuakamiulnuatsh – the Mashteuiatsh Innu, Diane Robertson’s people – in a circle formed by great plates of metal. Twenty-one years later, our performance in Calais revived the ‘memory’ of this first flag-raising, another Amerindian history of an Amerindian flag! Here again, the sacred and the political wee intertwined. In the case of the Mohawk Warrior Society (Iroquois), at the request of the women of the tribe, who exercise a decisive influence over our political decisions, they only demonstrate in response to conflicts or urgent need to protect traditional territory or rights. During the highly-publicised Kahnesatake-Oka crisis of summer 1990 in Quebec – the fourth time in Canada’s history that the army was called into action on Canadian soil. The first time dates back to the mid-19th century, when the army took action against the Métis. Since then the army has intervened three times in Quebec: first in 1914 in the City of Quebec to quell opposition to conscription, again

in 1970 wh�en the War Measures At was invoked against the terrorist militants of the Quebec Liberation Front, and most recently in 1990 when the army was used against Kahnesatake and Kahnawake Mohawk Indians near Montreal. Since then the flag of the Warrior Society has become a symbol of all contemporary indigenous conflicts, not only in Canada but worldwide: globalisation in action.

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The image of this flag as a symbol of indigenous resistance has inspired a trend for artistic reinterpretations of official flags, including the Canadian flag – for example, in the 1990s Ottawa’s Saw Gallery sponsored a ‘flag day’ project. Mohawk artist Greg Hill decided to replace the national flag’s traditional maple leaf with three feathers, representing Kanata as “Indian Land”. This logo was used on the official business cards of the Delegation of Indigenous Canadian Curators to the Venice Biennale in 2011, of which I was a member, while Greg Hill himself is now Head Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and was one of the three curators of the high-profile Sakahan exhibition of international indigenous art held in 2012. In Calais I was keen to include this artistic dimension as a counterpoint to the more straightforwardly heraldic intentions of these flags, particularly in a time of peace and not war, a consideration which underlies the ‘Monument’ programme as a whole. I also wanted to highlight the inclusion of a planted variation on the Warrior Society flag, a symbol of creativity renewed and reoriented in the form of a feminist reworking of the flag emanating from the ‘Idle No More’ movement currently active in Kanata (Canada).

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Calais’ Monument project evoked the memories of war, but also the aura of the city’s artistic heritage. In 1984 the shaman, artist and militant advocate of social sculpture and ‘life as art’ Joseph Beuys presented his first ever exhibition on French soil at Calais, Thirty years later, there I was as a Wendat (Huron) from Kébec (Quebec) in Kanata (Canada), burning tobacco in homage to the great trees of the Parc Richelieu just outside the very same museum in Calais, before planting indigenous flags on European soil. And this is by no means a coincidence. While in Calais, Joseph Beuys gave one of his most revealing interviews at the museum. This meeting was filmed. The first images of this video record show Beuys watching back one of his most famous performances on a small screen: I like America and America likes me: wrapped in a thick cloak of felt and supported at times by a cane, the artist is shown living side by side with a coyote. This performance took place in America ten years previously, in 1974. The shaman-artist had indeed shared a space with this coyote for three days at the René Block Gallery in New York. The coyote is found in the Central Plains and, much like the Crow on the west coast and the wolverine on the east coast, is a sacred animal representing the Trickster, a key archetype in Native American mythology. The aim of Beuys’ performance was to reconcile a Native American spiritual vision (the coyote) with both a Eurasian vision (the cane) and symbols of human survival (the felt). Two years previously, in 1982, Beuys had dominated Kassel’s documenta exhibition with his monumental environmental sculptural project 7000 Oaks. Just a few months later Beuys, accompanied by other artists such as Robert Filliou, went to meet the Dalai Lama in Bonn. The artistic shamanism of this politically-charged twentieth-century artist, evident in the forms taken by his ‘social sculpture’, was as much connected to the Native American spirit of Animals as it was to the spiritual and political combat of oppressed peoples such as the Tibetans and their reincarnated spiritual guide.

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As soon as I arrived in Calais I visited the Monument exhibition at the museum. The incredible critical insights on display immediately appealed to me. All of the works featured in the exhibition reconfigured the conventions of monumentality into myriad new forms and meanings, challenging notions of rigid historicity. Creating my own work required me to treat time – the project was scheduled to run for over six months – as a raw material. The aim was not to act exclusively in the present, but to work with variables which are essentially timeless, akin to those which underpin the rootless, atopic dynamics of mythology and technology. As a Native American my eye was immediately drawn to three works by Léa Le Bricomte (Tribal Warfare, Pigeon Drones, Sound Of War) which explore the essential connections, which at first sight may appear paradoxical, between the expressive, symbolic inclusiveness of the ‘animal spirit’ and the inseparable notion of spiritual breath. It is this breath which unites contemporary indigenous artists as Hunters/Shamans/Warriors, fundamental figures in Native American art and imagination. The artist, embracing the dialectical spirit of the female warrior, torn between the pressures to take up arms in order to disarm and to threaten for the purposes of defusing, hinted, like a pack of wolves, at three possible paths: - The feminised murmur of Tribal Warfare, a series of sculptures/projectiles (grenades, shells and shell casings) adorned with feathers. I immediately recognised these pearlescent feathers, as I was present when the artist herself came to select them from the craftsmen of Wendake, my tribal reserve;

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- The wonderful video shot from the perspective of pigeons flying over human territory (Pigeon Drones). This project involved attaching cameras to an armada of pigeons and releasing them to fly over Calais. The result is like a condensed vision of the ‘Native American perspective on animals’. This spiritual perspective is rooted in the mythological timescape, when OngweOngwe (Humains) communicated as equals with the Animals. Catapulted into our modern age of hyperlink nomadism, this ‘techno-logos’ continues to exert an influence through the art of healing and respect for Mother Earth. The toponymic expressions of this tradition in our languages – just like the denominations of our tribal allegiances, and even the Oki, the totemic spirits who watch over us – all spring from the spirit of animals; - The profound spiritual elevation of the sonic mandalas, firstly as a sculpture-installation (Sound Of War) and then performed in situ in two concerts involving 13 musicians, expands this vision to hint at the possibility of a universal, ecumenical indigenousness. The work invites us to listen, and to meditate on this process of renewal in social sculpture, previously heralded by Joseph Beuys himself here in Calais in 1984, breaking free of conceptual and contextual constraints to add a further, spiritual dimension (not to mention ethical, a subtext of the aesthetic). Such were the mnemonic, political, poetic and epistemological considerations which informed this project to plant indigenous flags as part of the Monument exhibition. Behind these Amerindian flag histories, the battlefield extends from Little Big Horne (1876) all the way to the bomb craters of Calais (1940-1943). And yet the field of Peace is so much broader. It is timeless and universal. While History remains a battlefield, perhaps more than ever, it also serves as an eternal exhortation to healing and Peace. Because Léa le Bricomte’s approach to this exhibition took the form of a ‘work in progress’, the collaboration in which she invited me to participate by planting these Amerindian flags in European

soil seemed to me a fitting ‘closing ceremony’ to the Monument programme. Art as a sum of multiple attitudes and disciplines, cohabiting in luminous peace indoors and out, in the museum and the park.

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In this, strategic, respect, my indigenous perspective on the transatlantic voyage of these flags, the shamanic aura of Calais and the spirit of Léa Bricomte’s works paradoxically marrying the symbolic heft of weapons and warriors with a call for peace, all combined to cement a network of shared artistic connections. These connections were mythological, spiritual and geopolitical, uniting people, places, times and collective imaginations. In other words creating networks, liaisons between different worlds: Amerindian, European and Asian, taking root together and inviting us, to borrow an expression used by Beuys in his Calais interview, “to redefine the future of humanity.”

Guy Sioui Durand Tsie8ei 8enho8en

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Léa le Bricompte, Drônes, 2014, Oeuvre produite dans le cadre du projet européen : Time and place par Cap Calaisis/jardin des arts

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Performance musicale au musée des beaux-arts de Calais en collaboration avec le conservatire à rayonnement départemental du Calaisis pendant les journées du patrimoine à partir de Sounds of war, oeuvre de Léa le Bricomte, produite dans le cadre du projet européen Time and place par Cap Calaisis/Jardin des arts

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Cécile Canel’s drawings Thanks Barbara Forest, Bernard Petry, Cecile Canel, le Conseil Général du Nord-Pas-de Calais, Edgard Vézinet, Fabrice Gallis, Mathilde Johan, le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais, Manu et Gaston, Nicolas Lafon, Yann Grienenberger

Les guerres ont engendré des architectures singulières: les bunkers. Ceux du Pas de Calais ont été érigés comme un point central dans l’organisation défensive et offensive de la stratégie de guerre totale du régime nazi.

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Wars have produced strange structures – bunkers. Those found in Pas de Calais were built as a central point in the defensive and offensive organisation of the Nazi regime’s total war strategy. In Israel, Micha Laury, who has lived in Tel Aviv since 1971, is confronted with the restrictive yet protective form of the bunker on a daily basis. Marked by the notions of defence and territorial occupation and under constant threat, he must adapt to his immediate surroundings and reduce his living space to that of a survival cell. The tank featured in Wolf Vostell’s screen print becomes a bunker, a nomadic military fortification. In Switzerland, Leo Fabrizio has photographed more than 400 bunkers, observing how they are often camouflaged, hidden within the landscape or in the guise of vernacular architecture. In Matthew Miller and Laurent Sfar’s sculptures, the blockhouse takes on the appearance of a modern-day house to question Paul Virilio’s administration of fear and the obsession with security that is turning our homes into fallout shelters and surveillance zones. Laurent Sfar is fascinated by architecture and public spaces. His works and projects are often context-specific, capturing a visceral, personal reaction to a given space. Models of the Ile de France is a series of closed, hermetic models surrounded by a vegetation which is more artificial than natural. There is no place here for humans. In the rich tradition of Piranesi’s imaginary spaces, these models can be read as three-dimensional insights into the mind of their creator, fantasies of form and line where reason is pitched against pure imagination. Laurent Sfar imagines suburban houses subjected to the strictures of military fortification, with defence and surveillance systems taking priority over lesser considerations such as actual living space. These imaginary suburbs are thus transformed into militarised

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zones, with the risk that human occupation will gradually become impossible if the imperatives of security and control are allowed to become the sole objectives of architecture and urban planning. Laurent Sfar experiments with these realities in his glass bunker project, which runs until 2015. The blast of the explosion is like the exhalation of the glassblower; the silica in the glass like that of the beaches that swallow up the bunkers with no foundations. In today’s societies, it is no longer necessarily the opacity and sturdiness of a wall that act as a barrier. Modern architecture has replaced walls with sheets of glass. Paradoxically, this transparency has become a common feature of town planning, revealing the challenges of surveillance and CCTV. Intimacy has given way to greater visibility and the permeability between individual and collective environments is increasingly real. Reflective screens serve only to accentuate the reciprocal contamination of interior and exterior spaces. Artist Dan Graham has highlighted the negative consequences of modern architecture, where transparency has removed the need for words by putting everything on display.

Extracts from Bunker archeology / THE MONOLITH/texts and photographs by Paul Virilio; translated from the french by George Collins, 2009, Princeton architectural press, New York: “ One of the essential characteristics of the bunker is that it is one of the rare modern monolithic architectures. 1 Linked to the ground, to the surrounding earth, the bunker, for mafouflage, tends to coalesce with the geological forms whose geometry results from the forces and exterior conditions that for centuries have modeled them. The bunker’s form anticipates this erosion by suppressing all superfluous forms; the bunker is prematurely worn and smoothed to avoid all impact. T nestles in the uninterrupted expanse of the landscape and disappears from our

1. Paul Virillo, Bunker archéologie, p. 37

perception, used as we are to bearings and markers. This unusual aspect of bunker forms-absolutely different from the forms of ordinary constructions, scandalous on a snapshot-paradoxically is able to go unnoticed in a natural environment. This factor can be found in certain nautical forms, as if hydrodynamic, aerodynamic, and aerostatic profiles allowing for the flow of fluids had the same power on visuality.2

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The blockhouse is still familiar, it coexists, it comes from the era that put an end to the stragegic notion of “forward” and “rear” (vanguard and rearguard) and began the new one of “above” and “below”, in which burial would be accomplished deinitively, and the Earth nothing more than an immense glacis exposed to nuclear fire. (…) Abandoned on the sand of the littoral like the skin of a species that has disappaered, the bunker is the last theatrical gesture in the endgame of Occidental military history. The ancient ramparts, the ditches surrounding cities, were a means to reorganize a landscape. You still stroll there on Sundays.3 ”

2. Paul Virillo, Bunker archéologie, p. 44 3. Paul Virillo, Bunker archéologie, p. 47

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This online edition is designed to be printed “ at home” and become a singular editorial object. It consists of 4 separate booklets and one cover, printed on 3 different papers and assembled in one edition by a wide elastic.

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The project TAP has been selected within the frame of the INTERREG IV A France (Channel) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; England cross-border European cooperation programme, part-financed by the ERDF.

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Barbara Forest

About Monument 03, last display of the Monument exhibition at the Fine arts museum, Calais. Director of the Fine arts museum, Calais.

In contemporary art, the commemoration of events takes forms that question our relationship to memory and history. The duty to remember could prove ideological or indulgent and the extreme media coverage of war a normalisation of violence. Our interest in war memorials and monuments to renowned individuals may have been rekindled but it remains ambivalent. We ignore them and they grow increasingly invisible. The artists are therefore circumspect in their handling of this subject matter, which they model with great humility. Some artists rejects the morbid spectacle of war, preferring instead to preserve intimacy and familiar memories at the risk of anonymity. John Cornu (view Â 5) documents objects that are steeped in history, restoring their power and impact. He has transformed 350 traps discovered in Verdun into a toxic, gossamer cloud and made butchers blocks as devastated as battlefields. Mark Edwards returns to Second World War air bases in England and observes their current condition. Other artists

study and document monuments to collective and individual memory. Isabelle Crespo-Rocha reappropriates war photographs as icons to be resurrected. Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet (view 6) replenish soap displaced or recently vandalized monuments. Matthew Miller (view 3 and 4) models real modern-day house transformed into blockhouses, as metaphors of our paranoia and witnesses of our world under surveillance. Since 1960, the notion of entropy has been brought to the meditative ruins fêted by the romantics, a mechanism that suspends and even does away with time and its linearity. The new monument is erected against time. More intimate architectures erected with a ‘make-do’ attitude make fragility a new paradigm of the monument. The works of Deborah Gardner (view 1) and Michel Le Belhomme (view 2) undermine the certainties of memory and architecture.

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Was born in 1976 in Seclin. Lives and works in Paris and Rennes John Cornu likes to use a wide range of materials and techniques, including sculpture in wood, marble and concrete, photography, architectural grafts, tattoos, neon lighting and watercolour. Much of his work combines a modernist philosophy (monochrome, seriality, coldness, modularity, etc.) with a more romantic approach that tends towards images of ruin, blindness and obliteration. He likes to upset the archetypes of a modernism that is as fascinating as it is idealistic and the paranoia-inducing power of certain materials or devices (arrow slits, traps, anti-tank barriers, panopticons). La mort dans l’âme is a series of romantic ‘ready-mades’ – old blackened chopping blocks bought from butchers who had either retired or died. Vanitas that are as palpable as they are ghostly, these pieces and their time-weathered surfaces reveal, simply and directly, the marks and scars from the knife blows inflicted upon them. This violence is clearly echoed in war and conflict. Indeed, we often speak of the First World War as a ‘butchery’ and carnage as a result of its terrible human toll. These black surfaces, worn by repetitive knife blows, convey the idea of a desolate, eroded and ruined land. The blocks become ravaged landscapes, like those of a battlefield or the trenches. In the same space hang 350 equally enigmatic metal objects with four black branches. They are German traps found just above the ground by the side of a path near to Verdun. These antiquated weapons injured the feet of both men and horses. The artist twists the original purpose of these dangerous devices by hanging them in a way that is documentary, artistic and invites remembrance. The light and elegant mobile Brume captures an explosion as it happens, blurring the perception of the space in which it takes place. The gossamer lightness that it inspires only just hides the scars of its ageing and a loaded, aggressive and underhand history.

John Cornu La mort dans l’âme, 2012, Butcher’s blocks, black painting And polish, variables sizes © John Cornu Courtesy the artist; Ricou Gallery; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

John Cornu Brume, 2012, 300 Chausses traps and black painting, variables sizes. View of the exhibition Viser la tête, Le Parvis centre d’art, Ibos. © John Cornu Photo. Alain Alquier Courtesy the artist; Ricou Gallery, Bruxelles; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

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Born in1965, Nocton. Lives and works in Norwich.. ‘I grew up in an area known as Bomber County and have always been fascinated by these Second World War airfields. When I came across these piles of wood at Hethel, an abandoned RAF air base, I knew straight away that I wanted to photograph these “monuments”. The wood had been cut from the surrounding forest and piled up among the ruins of the ramshackle military buildings, runways and barbed wire. These piles of wood looked like shelters reminiscent of the forest camps Primo Levi describes in If Not Now, When?. There was also an echo of W.G.Sebald’s vision when he evokes Cologne and other bombed-out European cities at the end of the hostilities. He describes the ruins and makeshift shelters as being “transformed by the dense green vegetation growing over them – the roads made their way through this new landscape like peaceful deep-set country lanes”. Some of the tracks and takeoff runways are today used by Lotus Cars for various trials and work and the roar of the engines seems appropriate as it reminds me of the noise that the B-17 and B-24 bombers must have made when taking off for their night-time missions into enemy territory. Hethel was built in Norfolk in 1942 and used as an operational base by the US air force, helping it to achieve strategic objectives in France, the Netherlands and Germany. The pilots took part in intensive raids and assisted the Normandy landings in June 1944 by bombing the German batteries, landing strips and enemy positions, as well as providing air support and interception.’

Mark Edwards Shelter n°2, 2014, Transparency in lightbox © Mark Edwards. Courtesy of the artist and Arts Council England.

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Born in1987, Echirolles. Lives and works in Grenoble. Isabelle Crespo-Rocha is an artist who works in photography, video and sculpture and who plays with the sensation of déjà-vu. Individual and collective memory become almost confused, creating a new space-time. The fragility of memory and its shifting nature, where what is true and what is false combine, give a seemingly familiar image an unsettling polysemy. She therefore does not so much address the commemorative aspect as the complexity of memory. In Instants, Isabelle Crespo-Rocha removes the human subjects and flags from iconic and controversial press photographs that were taken in 1945 and have become monuments. This creates a certain dramatic intensity that can be seen in the ruins where smoke remains, despite the absence of a human subject. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima was taken on 23 February 1945 by the American photographer Joe Rosenthal. It shows five US marines and a Navy nurse raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. The photograph immediately met with great acclaim and was reproduced in hundreds of publications. It also became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for photography in the year of its publication. Considered as one of the most iconic images of its time, it is also one of the most widely published photographs of all time. The photograph was later used by Félix de Weldon for his sculpture at the USMC war memorial, which is located near to the Arlington National Cemetery, not far from Washington DC. Raising the Flag on the Reichstag is another historic photograph from the Second World War and was taken during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945 by Yevgeny Khaldei. It shows soldiers raising the Soviet Union flag on top of the Reichstag building in Germany. The identity of the men in the photograph has often been disputed, as has that of the photographer. The Reichstag was built in 1894 and its architecture came to symbolise fascist power in the eyes of Soviet citizens. In reality, the Nazis themselves felt little affection for the Reichstag, which they saw as a symbol of democracy and kept closed following the infamous Reichstag fire in 1933.

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Jeanne Gillard was born in 1983 in Besançon. Nicolas Rivet was born in 1983 in Julienne. They live and work in the Doubs and in Genève.

Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet’s work is based on the perception of a work of art. They are artists and curators who create critical installations that question and document the transformation of an artistic object into a work of art from the dual perspective of the context and the spectator. ‘At the turn of the twenties, at the behest of the American sculptor Brenda Putnam, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, organised a national “soap sculpting” competition to promote Procter & Gamble’s product. Every year, thousands of soap sculptures were exhibited in American art galleries until 1940 and the end of the Great Depression. The competition drew a parallel between the pure iconography of classic sculpture and the whiteness and hygiene of soap and was aimed at a wide range of entrants, from complete beginners and novices to “professional” sculptors. The soap sculptures were described each year in the New York Times and together form a series of snapshots that reflect the American imagination of the time, from religious icons to wild and domestic animals and replicas of classical sculptures. The Soap Sculptures project takes up the iconography of this competition by creating a collection of soap replicas of public sculptures that have been “desituated” (placed or kept elsewhere from the site for which they were initially designed as a result of threats, conflict, censorship, etc.). After researching the history of banned monuments, I was able to observe that the reason for this censorship was not only linked to what a sculpture actually depicts, but above all to its relationship with certain elements in its immediate environment. This shows that understanding a sculpture is primarily about understanding the relational context in which it sits.’ Nicolas Rivet

Jeanne Gillard & Nicolas Rivet Soap Sculptures, 2013, Soap carving, graphite wood Courtesy of the artists.

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Born in 1961 and died in Brighton in 2011 Matthew Miller is interested in architectural forms as metaphors for our way of living and thinking and in particular for the extreme paranoia that emerged during the Cold War. His critical approach to architecture measures the gaps between an ideology of law and order, a political strategy, a militarised culture and an obsession with terror.The Underground series (2003-2006) are models of real-life houses that appear innocuous and conventional yet hide complex underground structures – military or domestic shelters. The models are built as though the Earth’s surface did not exist and has been removed to reveal more clearly the fantastical nature of this architecture and its unusual status. The subterranean part of the building is no longer inactive, but rather secretly supports the architectural volume as a secret base or shelter.The Underground series (2003-2006) are models of real-life houses that appear innocuous and conventional yet hide complex underground structures – military or domestic shelters. The models are built as though the Earth’s surface did not exist and has been removed to reveal more clearly the fantastical nature of this architecture and its unusual status. The subterranean part of the building is no longer inactive, but rather secretly supports the architectural volume as a secret base or shelter. Bungalow (2003) recreates a house that was used to hide an underground tunnel leading to a radar station, which was secretly built on the south coast of England in 1952, at the height of the Cold War. Snyder House (2006) was created for the Ruptures d’échelle exhibition at the L’H du Siège gallery in Valenciennes and is a replica of the property owned by the American university professor Kenley Snyder, who spent 14 years secretly digging a fallout shelter in Blaine, Washington, USA. Originally designed to protect his family, the project spiralled as his obsession and the caves grew, each fuelling the other.

Born in 1973, Rennes. Lives and works in Rennes. The series of photographs entitled La bête aveugle (2009-2013) takes its name from Edogawa Rampo’s detective novel, which was published in Japan in 1931. A blind masseur, obsessed with the perfection of the female body, leads his unwitting victims into cruel and perverse role plays. An aesthete, he celebrates art in a world of beauty that is purely tactile.

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There is nothing erotic about Michel Le Belhomme’s photographs, which feature no human subjects and have a dark and mysterious atmosphere. A certain theatricality serves to blur the frame of the image and that of the scene. The ambiguity is such that the loss of these bearings is blatant. Although the artist at first appears to adhere to the rules of classical theatre by bringing together a single action, space and temporality in each image, he completely changes their narrative coherence and references to reality. What is happening? Is the event real? On what level? A setting seems to have been created from scratch. The celebration of touch and the tactile value of things is clear in the heap, the collapse, the pile, the sheet, the fabric and the many different points of contact, from studded planks to hanging linen, bent branches, piled up bricks and stacked books – shapes and cheap materials constructed to create chimaera and their lairs. The artist creates environments that are marked by trauma, desolation, disorder, alienation and destitution. Confinement and imprisonment rule in these spaces where there is no natural light and where the landscape is just an illusion, the outside world uncertain. The makeshift shelters serve only to make this physical and psychological alienation even more violent. They are Platonic caves, where there is no depth or perspective and where everything is artifice, even the light. They reveal the blindness in which history plunges us, both that of world conflicts and our individual narratives. Perhaps La bête aveugle is a modern take on the method of loci – a mnemonic technique that associates a piece of information that needs to be memorised with, for example, a specific, familiar and intimate room?

Michel Le Belhomme Série La Bête Aveugle, 2009/2013, print ink jet satinied ilford pro © Michel Le Belhomme Courtesy Galerie Binôme, Paris et Michel Le Belhomme.

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Born in 1963, Newcastle. Lives and works in the Yorkshire. Since 2010, Deborah Gardner has been interested in the way in which sculpture can poetically translate space and landscape. In a recent project with the Arts Council Collection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Huddersfield Gallery, her work focussed on the landscape around Castle Hill, where a monument on top of the hill towers above the surrounding countryside. Yorkshire Monument (2011) was envisaged as the main piece for this exhibition. Many traces of successive occupants can still be seen at the site, from the Iron Age to the Norman Conquest and, more recently, the discovery of remains of an anti-aircraft battery dating from the Second World War. Castle Hill has become a place of research and myths. In this sculpture, the cardboard tower is perched on the bed like the Victoria Tower on Castle Hill, a monument that was built to celebrate Queen Victoriaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sixtieth year on the throne. A symbol and memorial of the monarchy, the tower still stands today, despite bombardments during the Second World War. The sculpture is made up of layers of fabrics, reels of thread, eiderdowns, blankets and household items, some taken straight from a bedroom and topped with tiny cardboard buildings. The resulting heap becomes a huge, unsteady construction. Miniaturisation, real-life sizes and monumentalisation share a single, concrete space, confusing our perception of scale. The archaeological section is transformed into accumulation, compression and assembly. An antiheroic monument, Yorkshire Monument is also a memorial where the depiction of the landscape, in all its complexity and dimensions, preserves the traces of an individual and collective history.

Deborah Gardner Yorshire Monument, 2011, textiles, yarn, recycled packing chips, cardboard, coal Courtesy of Deborah Gardner. ÂŠ Mike Anderson.

Born in 1969, Paris. Lives and works in Grenoble and Paris. Laurent Sfar is fascinated by architecture and public spaces. His works and projects are often context-specific, capturing a visceral, personal reaction to a given space. In Excavation, he used successive layers of sediment to bury the house designed by Le Corbusier on the Frugès estate in Pessac, near Bordeaux. Among the 50 or so houses which make up this garden city, created in 1925, only one was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. No photographic record of this lost house is known to have survived. With this artificial fossilisation, Laurent Sfar throws the distance between the original project and the inhabitants’ appropriation of their home environment into stark relief.

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He based his work on painstaking documentary research, going as far as to blow up an old photograph taken during the construction of one of the nearby houses, overlaying his sketches with architectural plans of the house and decorating the space’s exhibition with the colours proposed by the architect to a swiss company the year the house has been destroyed. Models of the Ile de France is a series of closed, hermetic models surrounded by a vegetation which is more artificial than natural. There is no place here for humans. In the rich tradition of Piranesi’s imaginary spaces, these models can be read as three dimensional insights into the mind of their creator, fantasies of form and line where reason is pitched against pure imagination. Laurent Sfar imagines suburban houses subjected to the structures of military fortification, with defence and surveillance systems taking priority over lesser considerations such as actual living space. These imaginary suburbs are thus transformed into militarised zones, with the risk that human occupation will gradually become impossible if the imperatives of security and control are allowed to become the sole objectives of architecture and urban planning.

Laurent Sfar Research surrounding Bunkers In glass of Laurent Sfar Sketches of the project made by Cecile Canet

Studies of glass-blowing made by Centre International du Verre À Meisenthal. © Guy Rebmeister CIAV Production of the Conseil Général du Pas-de-Calais with the participation of the musée des beaux-arts de Calais.

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Laurent Moszkowicz coordonnateur pédagogique de l’Ecole d’art du Calaisis

For more than 10 years, Calais Community Council has been implementing a voluntarist policy that seeks to promote artistic and cultural education. Through the ‘Jardin des Arts’ artistic and cultural education project, Calais Community Council and local cultural organisations have worked together to create unique, enriching and moving artistic and cultural experiences for young people and other residents of the Calais area. This year, Léa Le Bricomte was invited to the region as artistin-residence. In recent years, this project has expanded rapidly thanks to the EU-funded TAP (Time And Place) project, which allowed Léa Le Bricomte’s residency to take on an important crossborder and partnership-focussed dimension. An artistic presence is an important factor in stimulating growth in a region by means of cultural activities, supporting creativity and bringing the public and works of art together. It reveals a region’s distinctive characteristics and allows those living there to pool their energy on shared projects. Léa Le Bricomte was able to make full use of her unique artistic expression to experiment with ideas, unusual visions and collaborative processes that had never previously been explored. She had the intuition and passion needed to bring together stakeholders and resources from around the region and make them part of a dynamic creative process.

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These collaborations gave rise to many memorable experiences and opportunities for learning and sharing, by EDITION allowing those involved to combine different disciplines and N°3 FEBRUARY 2015 pool their experience. booklet His collaboration with Calais pigeon fanciers’ is an n°4 experience that has led to a long series of experiments, prototypes testing around the UAV project where a carrier with a micro camera flew over Calais. We could also experience other magical moments, born of the encounter with a conservatory percussion teacher and 10 students, with the performance “WARUM” where weapons of war are some Tibetan bowls. And to close these artistic experiences, then comes to the refund, the exhibition project, where the artist invites all those involved in the process. The next phase is the exhibition about the residency, to which the artist will invite all those who have been involved in the process. Children and adults are rarely indifferent to art when it is accompanied by moments of exchange and meeting with the artist. For all those who participated in this, these moments of visibility and meetings are a great way to increase understanding in the broader public what is today the reality and challenges of artistic practice.

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Daniel Lefebvre, pigeon keeper, owner of the ones that made the film. 182

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Léa Le Bricomte and Philippe Odent, president of the Calaisis pigeon fanciers’ group. 183

Sand mandala made at the Hautes Communes primary school in Marck 184

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Concert held at the Calais Museum of fine arts on 22 and 23 september for “ les journées ud patrimoine”‘ 187

What made you decide to take part in this project? First of all, I wanted my students to grasp just why it is so important to learn a foreign language and to see that language is a means of communication. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m also interested in art, the project itself was very rich and the organisers were friendly and enthusiastic. Did your pupilsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; attitude and involvement change as time went by? I have to admit that the class is more motivated by and have more aptitude for art than English, but this project helped boost their motivation as far as learning a language is concerned. Have you seen any tangible effects in their work or other aspects of classroom life? Spending five days together brought them closer together and was an opportunity for me to observe them outside of the classroom environment, which has to a certain extent changed my perception of the class. 188

Did any aspects of the project surprise you? I had no prior experience of art workshops and I appreciated the pedagogical approach to these activities.

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In your opinion, what were the project’s advantages and limitations? Both the guided tour of the Sainsbury Centre (in English) and the workshops with bilingual artists were both very beneficial. The pupils were pleased they could understand the instructions and explanations in English. On the other hand, they were very disappointed that they didn’t really have the chance to meet and discuss with English pupils, as this element was more or less non-existent. Has this project influenced your teaching practice and/or your future projects? I already used to organise my language projects around subjects that were of interest to the class, but I would hesitate to try and organise another exchange with an English school. Nevertheless, talking with the staff and artists at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts was very rewarding and that is something I hope to continue with other classes of art students. Did the specific French/English side to the project have a particular impact? The impact would have been greater had the exchange with the English children worked out as we intended. We could have been in touch in the lead up to and after our stay. On a more positive side, it was some of the pupils’ very first trip to Great Britain and they really enjoyed staying in the youth hostel. They also appreciated the quality of the works on show at the museum and the visits.

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The French and English pupils acted out the subjects and compositions of works they had discovered at the exhibition. 191

What made you decide to take part in this project? This project was quite different to previous projects with FRAC Basse-Normandie. It was a way of pushing back the boundaries, literally and metaphorically, and allowing a group of pupils to set off on an adventure to discover art collections and new exhibition spaces. This adventure focussed on creativity and developing exchanges between the pupils themselves and with the English-speaking museum guides. Even if it sounds rather presumptuous on my part, I thought that choosing English to give them their first real contact with the art world, a subject which they have been studying since at least Year 7, was much more than a simple exercise: I would qualify it as a real life experience. It required a cross-disciplinary commitment that was particularly interesting for me, as English is not my strongpoint. It was a way of showing the pupils that if you want to learn in life, it is important not to shy away from things you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand or master â&#x20AC;&#x201C; on the contrary. This was the utopian aspect to the project and I feel that is something that projects 192

need, otherwise they are nothing more than a variant on traditional tasks and exercises.

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Another important aspect was the opening of the booklet n°4 ‘Zérosix’ gallery in our school, which is the result of a previous project between pupils in Year 11 and an artist, Yann Géraud. ‘Running’ an art gallery is not an easy thing by any means: it requires continuity and diversity. The pupils must be able to come and see the works on show, as well as show their own. If we really want this gallery to be part of the art scene, we need to be rigorous and also try and open it out to a wider public. Our commitment to the project was part of this whole. Moreover, FRAC Basse-Normandie’s end of year exhibition presented works that dealt with warfare and this provided a link to ‘Monument’, another exhibition we saw at the FRAC. It’s as if these projects were building a chain, linking different artworks, artists and the pupils. Did your pupils’ attitude and involvement change as time went by? Have you seen any tangible effects in their work or other aspects of classroom life? During the first year of the project, there was a noticeable difference in the pupils’ involvement after visiting ‘Collection’ and ‘Monument’ at FRAC Basse-Normandie and meeting Rémy Jacquier, whose presentation enabled them to understand his approach to art. The class also appreciated the fact that an artist had made the effort to come and see them. In English, the class enjoyed in particular the Proust questionnaire and the short film presenting ‘Monument’. In art, they enjoyed the Mail Art and self-portrait photography projects that were intended to introduce them to the pupils from Norwich. They were also active on the Facebook page, but were disappointed by the lack of response from their English counterparts.

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1 A pupil working during the monotype workshop.

2 The class’ work was hung on the walls as the workshop went along. 195

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The pupils took part in a monotype workshop led by Théodora Lecrinier. 197

As far as their artistic practice was concerned, their first piece of work in their final school year included elements inspired by Rémy Jacquier’s artistic approach and I felt that they had understood the main questions raised at that time. Some pupils also referred to Rémy Jacquier’s work in their orals and essays, in particular to address such questions as appropriation and references in art. Did any aspects of the project surprise you? Something unexpected always happens when you meet new people, in this case it was working at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual arts with Théodora Lecrinier, a young artist that I didn’t know. I chose to take a back seat, which is something I don’t do very often. It is good to see how others work as you see things you’d never have thought of doing, or that you wouldn’t dare try. Surprises also come about when something that seemed impossible happens anyway. We did finally manage to spend a short time working with the English pupils and I saw a pedagogical approach which is in fact quite close to the way we work in art classes in French secondary schools. It would have made for some interesting discussions. I was also happily surprised that the pupils paid attention during the conferences in English at the Sainsbury Centre and with their efforts to speak with the English pupils. In your opinion, what were the project’s advantages and limitations? The main advantage was the way in which this project enabled me to create continuity in my pupils’ artistic practice and their reflections on the creative act and art culture in general. The highlight was of course the trip to discover a different country and culture. Its limits were specific to each individual. Projects like this are an exceptional opportunity for everyone. The personal involvement of each participant cannot be the sole result of the work of the organisers. Each pupil must be mature enough to commit personally, even if some need more support from the team than others. We were also limited by the language 198

barrier that made it difficult to discuss pedagogical questions and by the fact that not much time was devoted to this.

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Has this project influenced your teaching practice and/ or your future projects? You learn from experience and this is one of the essential components both in pedagogy and projects. A teacher’s contribution to a project like this is complementary to his/her work in class, especially as in art our work is mainly projectbased anyway. An art teacher is rarely in what a speaker at the ‘À Nous Deux’ seminar called a ‘vertical’ relationship with his/her pupils: that just wouldn’t work. I think our teaching is based on dialogue (to avoid using the term ‘horizontality’ that the same speaker used). I believe in an open and non-restrictive approach, one you could compare to a piece of flexible material. I use this term deliberately to evoke the materiality that any art project or art teaching should strive to preserve. I think that’s why there are no barriers when artists work with the class: their exchange is frank and direct. Although these artists are involved in a profound process of reflection, their thoughts are mainly concerned with this same materiality (in the widest possible sense of the term). It’s something I notice every time.

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Did the specific French/English side to the project have a particular impact? It made me realise that we don’t really have much information about teaching practices elsewhere in Europe, definitely in art and most probably not in the other subjects either.

*Alain Kerlan, Portrait de l’artiste en pédagogue (A portrait of the artist as a teacher), a conference during the ‘À NOUS DEUX’ study days, contemporary art and the public, 28-29 January 2015.

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1 Class visit to MONUMENT, an exhibition at FRAC Basse-Normandie. The Year 12 pupils at Lycée Dumont d’Urville filmed a presentation in English of the works on show.

2 We visited Reality: Modern & Contemporary British Painting. In pairs, one of the pupils was blindfolded and his/her partner had to describe a work of art. 201

Le projet TAP a été sélectionné dans le cadre du programme européen de cooperation transfrontalière INTERREG IV A France (Manche) – Angleterre, cofinancé par le FEDER.

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sylvie Froux, directrice du Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen Veronica Sekules, deputy director of the Sainsbury centre for Visual Arts, head of research and education Barbara Forest, directrice du musée des beaux-arts de Calais Jocelyn Cottencin, artiste et graphiste

Sylvie Froux, directrice du Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen Anne Cartel, assistante d’expositions, chargée du service culturel et du mécénat Raphaële Gruet, chargée de communication Veronica Sekules, deputy director of the Sainsbury centre for Visual Arts, head of research and education Amanda Geitner, chief curator at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Antoine Huet, project assistant at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Barbara Forest, directrice du musée des beaux-arts de Calais Marie Astrid Hennart, responsable de la programmation culturelle et de la communication du musée des beaux-arts de Calais Laurent Moszkowicz, coordonnateur du Jardin des arts, Communauté d’agglomération du Calaisis Rebecca Drew, Head of Finance and European Programmes, Fabrica, Brighton Tracey Gue, Digital Communications Coordinator, Fabrica, Brighton Jocelyn Cottencin, artiste et graphiste

L’auteur Mary Patterson, Les artistes, Guy Sioux Durand, Laurent Sfar et Léa Le Bricomte, Isabelle Marchaland, professeure d’arts plastiques au lycée Dumont d’Urville à Caen et Anne Florin, professeure d’anglais au lycée Dumont d’Urville Mathilde Johan, responsable des publics au Frac Basse Normandie, Caen Natacha Haffringues, assistante principale de conservation au musée des beaux-arts de Calais

Jocelyn Cottencin /Atelier Lieux Communs collaboration Bruno Kervern assisté de Sixtine Gervais

Les contributeurs, Pour le SCVA : Antoine Huet Pour le musée et le Jardin des arts :  La ville de Calais, la Communauté d’agglomération du Calaisis, le département du pas-de-Calais,

la région Nord pas-de-Calais, La Direction régionale des affaires culturelles du Nord pas de Calais, L’association des EDITION conservateurs des musées du Nord N°2 Pas de Calais, le Conservatoire à DECEMBER 2014 Rayonnement Départemental du Calaisis, les élèves et leurs professeurs Valérie et Eric Cannarozzo de l’école primaire des Hautes Communes de Marck, Daniel Lefebvre, colombophile et Philippe Odent, président du groupement colombophile du Calaisis. Bernard Petry, Cecile Canel, le Conseil Général du Nord-Pas-de Calais, Edgard Vézinet, Fabrice Gallis, Nicolas Lafon, Yann Grienenberger et les artistes : John Cornu, Isabelle Crespo-Rocha, Mark Edwards, Deborah Gardner, Jeanne Gillard & Nicolas Rivet, Léa Le Bricomte, Michel Le Belhomme, Matthew Miller, Guy Sioux Durand, Laurent Sfar Et du musée, Marie-Astrid Hennart et Natacha Haffringues Pour le Frac Basse-Normandie : Isabelle Marchaland, professeure d’arts plastiques au lycée Dumont d’Urville à Caen et Anne Florin, professeure d’anglais au lycée Dumont d’Urville la Région Basse-Normandie ; le Ministère de la Culture, Drac Basse-Normandie. Frac Basse-Normandie : Caroline Caillet, Anne Cartel, François Desloges, Raphaële Gruet, Mathilde Johan, Magali Kerdreux. Pour Fabrica : Rebecca Drew.

Pour le SCVA : Françoise Delas-Reisz ? Pour le MBA : Société HANCOCK-HUTTON Pour le Frac : Simon Thurston

Pour le musée des beaux-arts : John Cornu et Courtesy Ricou Gallery, Bruxelles & Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris / Isabelle Crespo-Rocha / Mark Edwards et Arts Council England / Deborah Gardner et Mike Anderson / Jeanne Gillard & Nicolas Rivet / Léa Le Bricomte et la Galerie Lara Vincy, Paris, Adagp, Paris, 2015 / Matthew Miller / Laurent Sfar et Cécile Canel, Guy Rebmeister CIAV / Fabien Marques, Musée des beaux-arts, Calais DR Frac : Mathilde Johan Jardin des arts : Laurent Moszkowicz

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Fonds régional d’art contemporain Basse-Normandie 9 rue Vaubenard - 14000 Caen Tel. : +33(0)2 31 93 09 00 www.frac-bn.org

25 rue Richelieu - 62100 Calais Tél. : +33(0)3 21 46 48 40 musee@mairie-calais.fr www.musee.calais.fr

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

University of East Anglia Norwich, NR4 7TJ +44 (0)1603 593199 www.scva.ac.uk The Undercroft below the War Memorial, City Hall, Norwich, NR2 1NH

Le projet TAP a été sélectionné dans le cadre du programme européen de cooperation transfrontalière INTERREG IV A France (Manche) – Angleterre, cofinancé par le FEDER. The project TAP has been selected within the frame of the INTERREG IV A France (Channel) – England cross-border European cooperation programme, part-financed by the ERDF.

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Musée des beaux-arts de Calais