ARCs

The Art and Anthropocene, History and Becoming ARC wishes to develop a way of conceiving and experimenting with art today, considering ecological issues (climate change, global health and the state of resources), new behaviours and narratives of the radical changes that involve our society. How can visual artists create in light of this new situation? How can we promote an art form that solicits ecological awareness in a relevant way?

The Anthropocene calls for transformations, sources of imagination and creativity, with respect for nature and life. It calls into question our representations and asks us new questions:

→ What links should we recreate with the Earth and the living?

→ What will we be confronted with: collapses, upheavals, uncertainties, instabilities, renunciations?

→ Isn’t reconnecting with nature and its aesthetics essential for the arts?

The ARC offers in-house sessions, but also invites guest artists and theorists, on subjects that will lay the foundations and issues of artistic creation and art today.

Paul Josef Crutzen, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, proposed the term Anthropocene in 1995, a term that has since been relayed by all media in a significant way. It inspires a worldwide art movement. The works of Anthropocene artists adopt a diversity of forms. Their works, sometimes dematerialized, borrow from the investigative technique of scientists, journalists and whistleblowers. They are also inspired by the practices of farmers or indigenous peoples.

The ARC Art and Anthropocene, History and Becoming is a place for exchange, research, creation, production and resources. It will be hosted throughout the academic year (several talks and contributions). The speakers are specialists from the world of art, the humanities and hard sciences (partnerships with MSH, INRA, Agrosup Dijon, the Urban School of Lyon, Art of Change21, COAL association etc.).

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Ease of speaking in relation to work carried out
→ Putting research, tools and techniques into perspective
→ Elaboration of a working method
→ Analysis and identifying conceptual proposals of works produced

EVALUATION
→ Continuous assessment.
→ Individual and collective hangings, internal debates and with invited personalities

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Quality and relevance of work handed in
→ Ability to put projects into perspective and cite its issues
→ Personal and collective investment
→ Origin and progress of the project, coherence, structuring the approach
→ Risk-taking, production, presentation of work, quality of the creations

Today’s society is faced with new challenges and the separation between art and science is no longer as segmented. Nowadays innovation requires an interdisciplinary approach where art and science inspire and reinforce each other’s practices and research.

We are witnessing many new approaches in which researchers, artists, designers and architects collaborate, exchange their knowledge and practices, create new contexts of knowledge and experimentation, present in contemporary art installations based on issues related to science and art, with regard to the special mechanisms that are created.

For several centuries a common territory has been established between the arts and sciences and this coming together tends to be consolidated today. More particularly, for the last 30 years, a good number of contemporary artists have been working on bringing together this territory and creating real mechanisms of space, physical spaces of perception, which reveal these interfaces between art and science and testify to new dialogue and synergy.

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Spirit of experimentation and research
→ Aesthetic sense
→ Curiosity, intuition.

EVALUATION
→ Object, installation, video, drawing, photography

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Methodology
→ Creation, inventiveness
→ Ability to formalise a scenario or a story

The ARC Body Practices is a collaboration between ENSA Dijon and Le Dancing CDCN (Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National) Dijon-Bourgogne.

It is run by two teachers, Patricia Brignone and Martine Le Gac, interested in questions around the body, identification and development of a personal artistic practice, being together, as well as the manner in which diverse expressions of the choreographic field pervade visual arts and vice versa.

Since it is a question of appreciating and identifying what happens to us, the ambition is also to go deeper with ARC participants into how to take this into account in visual or performance art, in which what is lived and perceived is transformed into a space-time specific to the work. Making presentations, representations calls for confrontation with other interesting artistic situations to discover, invest in and inventory.

The ARC timeslot provides for a series of physical practices, time for exchanges and diverse forms of enlightenment (historical, theoretical, trans-disciplinary). It is about proposing explorations that allow each student, teacher, dancer to always discover more about what concerns them and to embody it. The aim is that each person better perceives their own resources and draws on them to give form to a personal and collective artistic project.

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Physical participation is indispensible for both personal and group work
→ Required qualities: open to experimenting, evidence of curiosity, disposed to exchange
→ Among the aims: better know the functioning of the body, while going deeper with the notion and practice of research

EVALUATION
→ Collective participation and personal research combined
→ Continued involvement and potential proposals for ARC

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Dedication
→ Relevance of proposals
→ Critical Sense

How to take care of the earth, agree on its uses, draw them, think about them, live with them?

These are the general questions that this ARC will try to appropriate. At our level, ENSA Dijon offers the opportunity to benefit from exterior spaces: to make the garden into a place of experimentation of artistic practices related to the ground and the living, and from a design point of view to study ways to de- anthropocentrise its uses.

This year, we propose to focus our investigations on the presence of water in urban soil. We will conceive and create objects and installations that, for instance, produce a water cycle to de-waterproof the ground, capture water and/ or redistribute it.

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Develop practices of inquiry
→ Approach relational practices and design tactics in the conception of space

EVALUATION
→ Continuous assessment.
→ Research layout at second semester’s end

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and punctuality at every class
→ Participation, exchanges, mutual aid
→ Proposal Relevance
→ Artistic quality

The Contemporary Painting Practices of Painting ARC brings together students engaged in pictorial research within a workshop located in the school’s gymnasium of the school. Asking questions around contemporary painting practices, their specific features and their crossovers with other mediums will drive our exchanges.

These discussions will be complemented:

→ by the occasional invitation of artists around one of their works,

→ In collusion with engraving courses at the conservatory

→  by an annual workshop held in conjunction with the ARC.

6 theoretical courses are proposed in addition to the ARC, each student enrolled in the ARC must follow at least 2 of them:

→ The Origins of Abstraction

→ The Great Dates of Modernity.

→ Painter’s Questions

→ Current Affairs Exhibition

→ American Painting

→ Colour

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Good knowledge of the issues surrounding painting and its tools.

EVALUATION
→ The idea is to accompany students involved in a painting project to discover, experiment and develop a singularity in relation to the period.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Personal investment
→ Presentation of work
→ Project origin and development
→ Cultural relevance of the work
→ Work Quality

To the limits of yourself, to the limits of the real, of fears, of the possible, of law, of norms, of contingencies, of others, of landscapes. It consists of being explorer film-makers of the noises of the world.

Enriched with commented and analysed viewings (Werner Herzog, Vincent Munier et Marie Amiguet, Agnès Varda, Johan van der Keuken, Robert Morin, Peter Watkins, Lewis Bennett, Morgan Spurlock, Frederick Wiseman, Martin and Osa Johnson etc), talks, a festival trip, students will create a documentary film on a theme of their choosing, from the intimate to the geopolitical, from social struggles to extreme sports, from absurdities in current affairs to the beauty of nature, but always one step removed from limits.

Creator of our realities, this workshop will address issues behind contemporary documentary film-making. It will invite researcher students to take a position on topics in current society and subscribe to a singular and committed form. While questioning the infinity of possible devices today, from 16mm cameras to artificial intelligence, and the necessity of creating new images, or existing images (archives be it family, INA, NASA, cinemas), they will create a committed filmic object that starts from the point of view of an artist to meet the public.

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Acquisition of knowledge linked to documentary practises (Brothers Lumière via Jean Rouch and Edgard Morin, to Agostino Ferrente)
→ Writing a documentary project (files CNC, SCAM, different financing options)
→ Understanding issues surrounding documentaries (material, bias, point of view, distance, aesthetic)
→ Assimilating different stages of the filmic object, research to broadcast

EVALUATION
→ Continuous assessment
→ Presentations and collective analyses after viewing sessions

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Regular & frequent participation
→ Relevance to the topic addressed
→ Commitment to research and creation
→ Ability to lead a project to the end

This ARC is an open collective space that responds clearly to the philosophy of apprenticeship. Sculpture and installation are practices that can be envisaged collectively as they impose an immersion into demanding processes. Students enter with focus into a perpetual availability without limits in which nothing should be forbidden a priori in the field of conceptual and factual experimentation. Conscience is only refined when in contact with creation.

A new programme has been put in place for enrolling students about to graduate (3rd and 5th years). The ARC focuses on personal projects in the form of experiencing collective hangings with a view to preparing for the diploma.

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Knowledge, experimentation and mastery of artistic apparatus in the broader fields of sculpture and installation.
→ Elaboration of a working method based on student intentions.
→ Analysis and demonstration of conceptual and factual issues regarding volume and installation projects.

EVALUATION
→ Students will be evaluated in a collegial manner from collective hangings and corrections/debates.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Personal investment
→ Presentation of works
→ Project’s origin and development
→ Cultural investment
→ Quality of produced work

When we say the arts of sound, we use a term that is a bit catch-all, comprising experimental electronic music, acoustic and electric sound works, performances that play with spaces, sound installations: In fact everything that comes out of formats devoted to rock, pop, jazz or electronic music. But the arts of sound might also represent, more than a specific genre, an attitude, a relation to sounds, a cluster of practices, as related to contemporary music as to the worlds of performance and plastic arts. For composers like John Cage in the 1950s, and later Alvin Lucier, James Tenney or La Monte Young, it was a case of offering, both the musicians and the audience, a genuine listening experience, playing with the very character of sound: time distortion, the use of sounds in acoustic space, playing with its dynamics, from the barely audible to the very, very loud. For the sound creators of today, it is a case of rethinking our relationship to listening, to the codes of concerts and shows, to musical genres.

This ARC proposes a series of meetings, talks, and workshops for the discovery of the aesthetics and practices belonging to the arts of sound, for the students of ENSA Dijon, instrumental and electronic musicians and non-musicians. In particular they will put at the disposal of students a unique instrumentarium – mini-synthesisers, nail boards, micro switches, mixing consoles, set feedback, K7 cassette players – and invite them to collectively invent their own vision and interpretation of emblematic works of experimental music, textual scores and graphic notation.

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ To deepen theoretical, historical and practical knowledge of the medium of sound and music (spatial installation, thoughts on gesture, collective games).

EVALUATION
→ Sound creation, participation in classes and workshops as well as associated concerts.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Quality of research and implementation of sound works linked or not to image, space, object
→ Justification and references of choices taken
→ Commitment to research and creation

“Never before has human influence on the biosphere reached such a level. Concepts such as the Anthropocene and Ecosophy, which call for a shift away from an anthropocentric perspective, guide us daily in our teaching practice with future designers and artists.”

Focusing on quality of life in urban public spaces, making local living possible and comfortable, diversifying uses, and returning the city’s spaces to its residents—these efforts contribute to shaping new ways of thinking, new ethics of sharing, new forms of citizenship, and place the Sustainable Development Goals at the heart of new professional practices taught at ENSAD Dijon.

This project’s objective is twofold: pedagogically rooted in these questions, it also seeks to create, to create with others, to listen, to create here, and thereby propose (modest) ideas for a more social and sustainable city—one that does not rely solely on commercialization but instead re-centers the human aspect: fostering encounter, exchange, and play.

Based on a theoretical corpus and experimental projects we compile, we focus on understanding, intuiting, and testing new forms, new attitudes, and new typologies.

• Prospective experiments, installations, projections, provocations.

• On-site work with partners (Dijon Métropole, neighborhood associations, businesses).

• Workshops / international exchanges.

2024 / 2025 Project:

The “Espace Cirque” is a new cultural project developed by the Cirq’ônflex association, in close collaboration with the City of Dijon, located on a site in the heart of the Fontaine d’Ouche neighborhood. Conceived as a flexible artistic project, blending diverse uses and audiences, it will consist of regular installations of big tops and other itinerant structures at different times of the year.

Positioned both as a temporary space/place and a shared public space, we will explore artistic, functional, and possibly modular setups and installations that can occupy this space at various times of the year (during and/or outside active operation).

SKILLS DEVELOPED
→ Ability to question openly an issue, a topic
→ Plasticity
→ Methodology to conceive and develop

EVALUATION
→ Commented hangings
→ In situ installation of projects

EVALUATION CRITERIA
→ Attendance and timekeeping at all classes
→ Conceptual ability
→ Work quality