Visio-corporal metamorphoses: participatory artistic action at Louvre Lens

A pictorial account of the shared poetic creation of visio-corporeal transformations, proposed by Benoît Labourdette, with painting, drawing, video projectors, photography, cell phones and digital tools, at the Louvre Lens on Saturday, December 9, 2023, as part of the exhibition “Fantastic Animals”.

Creative cooperation

My presence to animate this proposal was born of a partnership between the Louvre Lens and the Master Expographie Muséographie of the Université d’Artois (directed by Isabelle Gillet and Serge Chaumier). The students were tasked with proposing and overseeing multiple participatory proposals for a day of cultural action as part of the “Fantastic Animals” exhibition. After I’d led a mapping vidéo workshop, a small group (Loona Gros, Joséphine Vachon, Titouan Delcher, Pauline Tiadina and Drella Hubert) suggested that I take the idea further. So we conceived the project together, in particular around the unfolded ink blots proposed by Drella Hubert (the group’s referent for this project) evoking the Rorschach test, which produces organic figures almost immediately, and ties in with my work on the kaleidoscope.

On the Louvre Lens side, Florence Borel and Marion Charneau, in charge of mediation projects, ensured that the project was supported, supervised and properly integrated into the site and its teams. Every detail was co-constructed, enabling the proposal to be fine-tuned step by step. The action took place in the “Salon des mécènes”, a highly original round glass room, whose curtains had been completely drawn to transform it into a panorama.

The project was then articulated with the École de la Deuxième Chance de l’Artois (and the two trainers Claire De Molenaar and Oxanne Komilkiw): a group of young people supervised by the establishment came ten days before the event to test the proposal, specify how it would work, and above all prepare to lead the mediation to the public together on Saturday December 9, 2023. The artistic project (i.e. what we’re going to create and how we’re going to create it) would not have been the same without this group (Célya, Coralie, Elsa, Julie, Kari, Laura, Laurine, Mattheo, Nawel, Noah and Ogïez Maïli), and I think it’s important to make that clear.

And the “big day” arrived: supervised by a dozen young mediators, some sixty participants experimented with the proposal during the afternoon. Everyone took on their own role, and we adapted the set-up as we went along. Our greatest gift was the pleasure and joy of the participants (especially the families) as they made the artistic device their own, between drawing, painting, projecting, staging themselves, taking photographs and then putting them online, all in a spirit of wonder, laughter and concentration.

The activity took place in four stages:

1. Graphic creation (drawing, painting).
2. Projection of creations in the room, using 3 head-bench cameras and 3 short-throw video projectors to create a panorama.
3. Self-staging in the image space.
4. Participants photographed and uploaded their own photos online, using a QR code to access a digital sharing space, to create a shared archive of this creative moment.

The digital sharing space

Analysis of the process

I have chosen to tell the story of this action, because it embodies the values and methods I am calling for in the cultural sector:

• Respect for people’s cultural rights, i.e. the place and full autonomy of each individual in the artistic process.
• The artist is in a position to share his or her universe and invite others to transform it through participation. He also comes away enriched, if he is sincerely open to the encounter. I feel that this posture allows us to go much further than a simple presentation of works. Today, with cultural dissemination via the Internet, we have access to works as spectators. But I believe that in the “face-to-face” encounter, there is the potential for a deeper, more transformative, more emancipating encounter, which we must work towards. It means taking the risk of enriching each other, which implies accepting to be destabilized by other contributions and visions than one’s own.
• The use of digital technology as a bonding and identity-building factor: the fact that everyone shares their creations in the same digital space lends importance to each person’s creation, creates links between productions and inscribes them in the long term, thus creating a genuine heritage; and the value of this experience is inscribed all the more strongly in each individual.
• Genuine cooperation between different partners at every stage, enabling the artistic project to be defined, transformed, adapted, matured and enriched.

This type of project raises the question of the definition of art and the boundary (to be deconstructed, in my opinion) between artistic project and cultural action project. The social role of the artist, the definition of the work of art and that of the author are then modified, and hierarchies are transformed. It’s not a question of less exacting artistic standards, but of more exacting human standards in artistic projects, of attention to others and to links, which opens the way to collective intelligence and to even more beautiful creations, in my opinion, because everyone has a wealth to share. It’s a long road, because it challenges our identities, but it opens the way to a living, vivacious, shared and renewed art. In this regard, I recall a quote from the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in “Art as Experience” (1934):

We usually identify the work of art with the building, book, painting or statue whose existence lies on the margins of human experience. Since the true work of art is in fact composed of the actions and effects of this product on experience, this identification does not promote understanding.