RESEARCH INTRODUCTION

Art & Society Research Unit (RU)

Created in collaboration with the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) at the University of Burgundy, the research unit (RU) ‘Art & Society’ organises all research activities within ENSA Dijon.

With the centres of Pedagogy, Student Life and International Relations, it supplies the support, be it human, material, financial, technical, or institutional, that allows for putting into place research and works towards sharing, valuing and recognising research that takes place in art and design at the heart of the school.

Its members include all of the school’s teachers–artists, designers and theoreticians–who are engaged in research activities in parallel with their teaching duties and their individual and independent professional, artistic, design and theoretical practices. Research thus reflects the artistic media (design, drawing, painting, performance, photography, sound, video, volume, etc.) and forms of knowledge (art history, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural theory) practiced in the school.

 

Research in art schools: invention, experimentation, sharing

Although art and science–whether human and social sciences, formal sciences (logic, mathematics) and natural sciences (physics, biology, etc.) or engineering sciences–differ in their internal criteria and their own aims, they have never been alien to each other. Research is consubstantial with them, and both constitute activities that are based on the logic of experimentation and invention.

In the course of their history, art and science (and technology) have never ceased to be challenged or even provoked by each other: from geometry, physics or the theory of emotions, yesterday, to contemporary epistemologies stemming from environmental sciences (ecology), digital technologies and their anthropological stakes, such as those of gender studies and postcolonial approaches to theories of culture and domination.

Because the questioning of the forms of restitution of research belongs to the very process of research, and while today, in the scientific world, new forms of approaches and restitution of research are emerging (practice-based-research, etc.), the Research Unit “Research on the environment” is also concerned with the questioning of the forms of restitution of research. While relying on the established academic forms of sharing research results (colloquia, publications), the “Art and Society” Research Unit initiates, encourages and accompanies the invention of new, often hybrid, forms specific to art school research: exhibitions, devices, collective works, etc.

Partner Institutes

• Centre of Action and Research in Contemporary Art in Dijon (ENSA Dijon, The Consortium Art Centre, FRAC Burgundy and Dijon’s Fine Arts Museum)
• The New Patrons for Arts and Sciences (Nouveaux Commanditaires);
• Network of Higher Education in Art;
• Platform of Art Schools in Burgundy Franche-Comté
• Greater Dijon

Scientific partners

• Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH Dijon), University of Burgundy USR CNRS 3516;
• Laboratoire ARTeHIS – Archéologie, Terre, Histoire; CNRS (Institue of Human and Social Sciences and the Institute of Ecology and the Environment), University of Burgundy and the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
• CESAER – Centre of Economics and Applied Sociology in Agricultural and Rural Spaces.
• Agro Institute Dijon, National Institute for Higher Studies in Agricultural Sciences, Food and the Environment
• LIR3S (Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Recherche: Sociétes, Sensibilités et Soin (University of Burgundy)

 

Axis Research

The research at the core of the research unit Art & Society is organised around two structural themes, transversal and multi-disciplinary. These axes, which are not mutually exclusive, allow for the identification the domains in which members of the RU situate their research activity.

Axis 1 – Materials, mediA, intermedialities
This axis questions the relations of media to their own specificity (procedures, methods, histories) and their own identity, as well as to the types of alterities that question them (hybrid forms and translatability of languages; relation of learned forms / popular forms, new technologies; relation of art / culture; autonomy and heteronomy of art; questions around exhibitions).

Axis 2 – Crises, contexts, combats
This axis addresses the question of art and design in light of their relations with knowledge and power, in as much as they interrogate practices and presentations of visibility and invisibility, eventually generators of violence. In that respect, artistic and design practices cross-reference forms of knowledge and militant practices (ecology, feminism). Hence this particular insistence on the question of inclusion, of place (urban spaces, rural worlds, the margins, migrations), and their contrary (non-places, uprooting etc).

At the core of both axes can be organised one-off events (publication, conferences, exhibition) or even research programmes on a larger scale.

 

Research Programmes

1 / Urban Mutations

Headed by: Laurent Matras, Hélène Robert, Leila Toussaint
Linked with: ARC MUUR – Research & Creation Workshop Urban Mutations (headed by Laurent Matras, Hélène Robert, Leïla Toussaint)

The transdisciplinary research programme Urban Mutations is an extension of the Bachelor and Masters teaching delivered by the ENSA Dijon Design Option team (studio projects, classes, ARC, workshops). It brings together designers, architects, scenographers, landscape designers, artists and theoricians with all areas mixed up in communal space of thought and imagination, of proposition and urban experimentation strongly rooted in the ecological, political and social realities of cities in the anthropocene age.

Currently humanity is affected by an ecological crisis – pollution, dwindling natural resources, the destruction of ecosystems, the disappearance of biodiversity, climatic warming and disruption, proliferation of extreme episodes of drought and heatwaves – along with the economic, social and political consequences. These force us to radically rethink not only modes of production and consumption but also our way of living and especially living in a city, namely to produce and consume space and time. It questions our use of space and our daily choreographies.

Cities, particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental crisis, are partly responsible for it. It means that cities can also be the place for local solutions to this global problem.

Design, for a long time confined to the sphere of marketing, today constitutes a collective open to thought, practices and mechanisms at the intersection of research and creation, working, with the same sensory perception (affordance), on the representations and uses of our environment, like vectors to transform urban space.

To think about and know a city as a completely separate ecosystem, to take care of the plant and animal biodiversity it shelters, to promote urban agriculture aimed at alimentary autonomy without endangering the environment, and more globally rethinking the relations between city/nature, that implies also thinking about the activities and socio-economic temporalities of a city. Like slow cities which are spreading all over the world, cities should also incorporate soft mobility (bicycles) and non-carbon ways of moving whose current growth is revealing.

Eco-design thinks about the environmental impact of the materials and forms it implements, extolling low-tech and DIY, self-help and reuse, in inspiring vernacular practices. This relation to the work of the material sustains a relation to space by its investment of zones left vacant or without quality by modernisation or economic crisis: industrial wastelands and urban interstices can be places of transitory urbanism where can be experimented other manners of living collectively in the city, and a parking lot or frontage becomes through a micro-intervention (urban acupuncture) spaces of urban tactics like so many gestures – light and joyous, temporary and festive –aiming to reconquer the streets.

Faced with the tendency to standardisation, functional uniformity, social homogeneity and in the end to the sterilisation of public privatised spaces increasingly devoted to commerce and to consumption under CCTV, it is necessary to imagine inventive forms to live in the city that are likely to revitalise it.

In addition, everywhere can be heard, increasingly loudly, the hopes of city dwellers for a renewed urban democracy – a right to the city – in which citizens, either with collaboration or participation, become actively implicated in projects implemented by private and/or public actors, concerning their living space, be it a street, place, neighbourhood, living place, or even a place which has not been assigned a function in advance and which is reinvented according to use.

The idea of a desirable city – where the notion of pleasure is not annexed to consumerism – because to be equal (open to all) requires in effect to take into account diversity and the unforeseeable uses and users, be it by age, gender or social and cultural origin. New urban design practices are nourished thus by the input of contemporary critical theories (feminist theories and gender criticism, post-colonial theories, care theories). The Urban Mutations programme follows in the wake of numerous multidisciplinary collectives reuniting urbanists, videomakers, designers, architects, philosophers, scenographers, sociologists and landscape architect (Bellastock, EXYZT, le Bruit du frigo, Encore heureux) with whom they will regularly work.

Experimentation in situ, workshops, conferences, publications – including original translations of inescapable Anglo-Saxon authors – will make up the research activities of this programme.

To de-focus the viewpoint and deepen the explorations, the Urban Mutations programme draws on the partnership between ENSA Dijon and the School of Art and Design of the Technical University of Hubei in Wuhan, China, by putting in place cross-worshops

 

2 / Programme Nouveaux Commanditaires

Headed by: Mari Linnman and Pierre Marsaa, la Société des Nouveaux commanditaires
Co-headed by: two “historic” mediators of la Société de Nouveaux Commanditaires, this research axis aims to experiment with the process of unique  mediation that Nouveaux Commanditaires protocol set in operation

How to support citizens, committed and confronted with social issues or developing a territory, by involving artists and researchers in their thinking?

Through the implementation of a series of situations (what is often called workshops or collaborative working), we seek to define the procedures at work: How is a focus group formed? How does it work? How does it make decisions, who should be met to share its preoccupations, its knowledge? What link does this group have with authority, history, legitimacy, money, or art?

These situations unite researchers, artists, students, teachers, mediators and representatives from civic society. In the image of a NC group and thanks to its homogenous character, it is a question of inventing circumstances that will allow members to work together, on equal footing.

These situations will be arranged throughout the year around topics which will be debated together, in the framework of a mediation office formed at the year’s start.

 

3 / Programme Painting and Colour

Headed by: Alain Bourgeois, Anne Brégeaut, Bruno Rousselot
Linked ARC: Contemporary Painting Practices (Alain Bourgeois, Anne Brégeaut & Bruno Rousselot)

Starting out as a drawing school, ENSA Dijon has developed at its core a research programme centred on current painting practices.

This programme follows in the wake of teaching delivered to Bachelor and Masters students (theory and workshops, ARC and workshops). It draws on the spaces and structures that the school have devoted to painting and colour: The Painting Workshop, the European Colour Observatory (ECO), which maps the relation between scientific theory of colour and contemporary artistic practices.

Closely linking historical review, theoretical expression and experimental practice, the activities of the research programme “Painting and Colour” is open and multi-form: invitations of international artists in the presence of one of their works (Olivier Mosset, Pierre Mabille, Eva Nielsen, Philippe Mayaux and Yan-Pei Ming), talks and theory classes on the historical and current context of painting (Michèle Martel and Bernard Marcadé), workshops with invited artists (Amélie Bertrand, Christopher Cuzin or Elodie Boutry), student exhibitions in professional art venues.

 

Research projects 2022-2023

« HEARTH » Aesthetics of the Anthropocene: Fear, Delights, Hope

[STUDY DAYS]

date: 23-24 November 2022
ARC: Art and Anthropocène, history and becoming
Scientific Leadership and Organisation: Paul Ardenne, Art Historian, Writer and Exhibition Curator, Carlos Castillo, Artist and Art Teacher at ENSA Dijon, Pauline Lisowski, Art Critic AICA and CEA.

With urbanisation, soil artificialisation and deforestation, humans are increasingly above ground and cut off from the fundamentals of the living. It is thus the era of pandemics and dysbiosis that weakens human health and ecosystems. The challenge to come is to redeploy the living and nature in keeping with ourselves and to leave behind the eco-anxiety that is affecting the majority of the world’s young.

How to create with alternative and/or natural materials, while respecting nature? What connections should artists and creators in general weave with the living? How to mobilise with creation to face the challenges posed by Anthropocene? Art participates in this essential mutation that the Anthropocene imposes on humanity, a challenge in which to point out is not enough. It is necessary to become informed, think, make yourself intellectually available to the crucial issues that are posed by climatic deregulation, the collapse of biodiversity, threats to the planet’s health (One Health), pollution, and the depletion of the earth’s resources.

But nature has some surprises in store. The potential for regenerating ecosystems is itself a source of creativity and new possibilities. Nature contains in herself the seeds of her own renaissance, even unexpected. It remains to rehabilitate her in the hearts of humans to harvest her fruits and bring another viewpoint, directed towards life.

Uniting artists with theorists (scientists, geographers, philosophers, architects, landscape architects, historians, art critics, directors of associations, committed to the protection of nature), these study days are built around 4 broad themes, to try to encompass the issues of Anthropocene and reveal the ways that some artists and creators are engaged in actions for ecology.

 

1. The Art and Culture of Fear

For at least 10 years, the Anthropocene is at the heart of numerous debates, often controversial. Is the concept, forged by the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Josef Crutzen at the end of the 20th century, valid, disputable, adapted for the current climate situation? This issue has mobilised as much the scientists and politicians as the multiple agents who make up the cultural sector urbi et orbi. The world becomes “Hearth” the heart of the earth and its destiny, that we are pushing to calamity.

How can the art world answer the threat of a global warming, ecologically and humanly destructive? The Hearth, these are creative watchdogs, warnings, cautions, remedial creations too whose ethical finality seeks to restore a certain harmony between humans and ecosystems. These are also poetic-aesthetic developments about the new great fear attached to the Anthropocene and to its difficult to discern progress. Images of collapse-logical fear and the dystopic destruction of humanity, of the general exhaustion of human civilisation, delivered and adopted not without sometimes a notable complacency (the end of the world is exciting and photogenic).

Beyond the consideration of ecological forms and the art ecosophics correlated to them, these study days are concerned with these questions: how to live in the ruins of the world and why? What does it really mean this ruin? The close-up view and the view from afar, in this case overlapping, becomes reciprocally blurred. The Hearth knows mental dystole and systole, it is time for conceptual balancing in against the backdrop of intellectual and sensitive rearming (what is a human, in point of fact, when the environment that he/she domesticated induced its potential destruction?)

The question is also nagging, heady, vitiating our potential for joy: how to love ourselves henceforth, other humans, our own gravediggers?

 

2. Warn

In view of the environmental crisis, one of the first reflexes of the artist is to warn. Art does not always deal with the beauty of the world or the complexity of its possible representations. It can also make itself contextual. In this case it is necessary to proceed in function of reality as it happens. A so-called art of context sees the artist, as a witness of his/her age, react according to the given situation and create relevant to this latter an artwork that is linked to it directly.

 

3. Act

The impulse that consists in warning induces that we act, that we do not stand by motionless faced with a situation that becoming scandalous or unsustainable. The act of warning, in itself, is already a form of action, along the lines of an intervention, a classic topic of contextual art.

The sciences of the living lead to hope in developing actions to regenerate nature and the ecosystems. Agro-ecology is a path of restoring the balance of ecosystems and harmony between humans, animals, plants and ecosystems. Revegetation is at the the heart of a future renewed with hopes. It appeals to actions and a combat to reintroduce nature at all levels of society.

 

4. Dream

It is possible to dwell on the value of these types of artistic action, or rather on what could well be their non-value potential – these actions, being artists, do they ever have an opportunity, notably, to be truly operational, truly effective on a concrete level? To point out their factual and isolated character, in other words their little efficiency, is legitimate. It remains that art, to its disadvantage is not first-off a productive practice like the actions of militants or firms engaged in battle or a specific production. Art does not build the world, it gives possible form to its construction. To ask a green artist to become the saviour of a world in which the environment erodes before our eyes is relevant but excessive.

So what then? The green artist has at heart, not the illusion that we can save the world with creations that emerged from his/her imagination, but in hoping that it is contagious, the very principle of exemplarity, from a pioneering and pedagogical viewpoint.

These study and research days on 23-24 November 2022, will allow for moments of meeting and discussion between specialists, invited guests and students during the visit to the students’ exhibition of the ARC “Art and Anthropocene”, at the Saint Philibert Church.

 

FOOD CULTURES, ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION AND PUBLIC SPACES

[STUDY DAYS]

date: Spring 2023
ARC: Urban Mutations
Scientific Leadership and Organisation: Mathieu Duboys-De-Labarre (Institut Agro Dijon), Lambert Dousson and Hélène Robert (ENSA Dijon)

Co-organised by ENSA Dijon and l’Institut national supérieur des sciences agronomiques, de l’alimentation et de l’environnement (Institut Agro Dijon), these study days are made up of an initial meeting between practitioners and theorists of these two institutions for teaching and research.

The aim of this scientific meeting is to reflect on the question of culinary practices and food cultures, in which we would like to address issues concerning the ecology (biodiversity), the economy (relations between producers and consumers), and socio-cultural issues (relations between innovation, multi-culturalism of food practices, conditions of access to quality food) under the prism of public space, the street.

The expression of cultural uniqueness, of transmitted know-how, moments of conviviality, of sharing, of exchange – of foods and practices, words and thoughts – the acts of drinking, eating, cooking, behind their outward simplicity, are at the heart of complex and crucial issues that they impact and problematize. Material and immaterial heritage (member of Climats de Bourgogne and UNESCO world heritage), policies of urban planning (Construction of Dijon’s Cité internationale de la Gastronomie et du vin), relations between city and countryside (terroir value, spatial-economic issues of distribution and exploitation-transformation-artificialisation of agricultural land), mingle inextricably with the increasingly catastrophic effects on cities and agricultural land with the deregulation of the world climate, globally inflated prices of raw materials in terms of the regulatory function of states, and the violence of geopolitical relations (tensions surrounding migratory movements, the image of the foreigner, the Russian military assault on the Ukraine).

How, in the act of cooking, in that of eating and drinking, is it possible, to revitalise public spaces when security and consumer imperatives tend to sterilise them, at the same time to make people encounter others of all ages and every origin when socio-economic inequalities fragment cities more and more, and to imagine relations to nature without predation?

These days aim to understand with what conditions and measures, design, through small actions, mechanisms and the new urban scenography it proposes can contribute to unknotting some of these threads by working the very practices of space (to recall an expression of Michel Certeau) activated in culinary gestures and words.

 

YET THEY WERE THERE: FEMALE WORKERS, MILITANTS AND CREATORS

[RESEARCH PROJECT]

Partners: ENSA Dijon / Université de Franche Comté
Artistic Leadership: Marta Álvarez (Université de Franche Comté), Pascale Séquer (ENSA Dijon)
Museological Assitant: Tatiana Salazar
Museographical Assistants: Mathilde Foignot, Vincent Lauth, Laurina Nice, Eugénie Tirole, Blandine Urlacher
Photographers: Viviane Aymonin, Romane Buisset, Bernard Faille, Quentin Fumey, Juliana Herrán García, Marie Vincianne Maca, Laura Martínez Agudelo, Alexandra Mérienne, Laureano Montero, Elena Loredana Negut, Florence Schall

This research project seeks to contribute to determining the place of women in social movements in the Burgundy Franche-Comté region (1967-1985)

The way is open for some researchers to focus on the study of cultural actions that are at the heart of these movements. It is thus that as a first step, female presence is questioned at the centre of cinema groups Medvedkine (Besançon, Sochaux), in initiatives such as the Rhodiacéta library or through links established with other militant movements (as between women workers at Lip and the group of female video-makers who created the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Centre in 1982.

This research work will also be a memory work, starting from artistic creation. It aims to prioritise intergenerational exchange, between these women and the students who join our groups for research and artistic production. The short film “And yet they were there” mixes the voices and perspectives of the generations, in questioning the militancy and the place of women in the 1960s, questions that are also at the heart of a photography exhibition to be presented in 2022-23. A study day in January 2023 will be the occasion to return to these experiences, communicate the results of our work and exchanges with other researchers.

This work will continue by putting past workers in dialogue with present ones in the region. What do they know about the struggles of yesteryear? How do they perceive these workers’ memories? Who are the workers from Franche-Conté at the time of delocalisation and at the dawn of a possible relocation of factories?

This thinking about women workers of our time will be put into perspective with discussions produced by hegemonic media and will integrate as well research led in the framework of the ENSA ARC Action Comics and in the study days on SuperHeroes-Heroines organised by Dijon and Besançon Universities (November 2022). How to articulate these injunctions to the extraordinary and all-powerful, omnipresent in mass cultural objects, with the world of work, especially precarious jobs? Do female workers recognise themselves as superheroines of everyday or rather do they bring us the keys to deconstruct dominant discussions and to construct others against the hegemony?

Project made possible with support from:

• DRAC Burgundy Franche-Conté
• L’ANR RITM UBFC
• Laboratoire CRIT EA3224
• Service Science, Arts et Cultures de l’Université de Franche Comté
• UFR SLHS, Université de Franche Comté

CLAIRE ANGELINI, AU TEMPS DES AUTRES: A DOCUMENTARY ESSAY

Travel diary, film-essay and protean proposal, “Au temps des autres” measures the presence and absence of foreigners in the south of the Morvan in light of a long period of history.

While the living finds in the mountain indecipherable snippets of past humanity, the absent of the plain seem to have left behind them remains that we don’t even know how to decipher. Thus emerges gradually the sense of presence and disappearance of foreigners at the heart of this small territory that they established – Spanish, the Harki, the Polish – the most advantaged and exploited labour there is.

To retrace their buried presence in the post-industrial countryside of this region is to recover a memory of places and beings, and by this emergence of another history, make an act of resistance.

The practice of observed archaeology in parallel to this quest, allow us to open a discussion on history as materiality as well as on the lack of transparency and the lack of what is at the heart of our otherness.

The project takes 2 forms: one a feature-length documentary film (123’) and the other a performance-projection (varying length).

In the feature-length film the voice-over guides the viewer, taken on a trip to this region, that is also a quest and inquiry in the search for foreigners and their history.

In the performance-projection version, the actress, herself present in the projection, follows in real-time fragments of the film she is projecting, according to her word and in relation to the viewers’ proximity.

Started in 2016 as part of the ARC “Representations of the Foreign, Documentary Arts” coordinated by Philippe Bazin, Photographer and Professor at ENSA Dijon, the “documentary essay” of Claire Angelini, in 2020-21 “Au temps des autres” was broadcast in several cultural venues in the Burgundy Franche-Conté region.

 

APA PARIS-DIJON: ARCHIVES OF ARTISTIC PEDAGOGY, THE PARIS AND DIJON BEAUX-ARTS

[RESEARCH PROJECT]

Partners: CNRS (Laboratoire LIR3S de l’Université de Dijon) / École des Beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA) / École des Beaux-arts de Dijon (ENSA Dijon) / École Nationale des Chartes (ENC)
Scientific Leadership and Organisation: Déborah Laks (CNRS – LIR3S, Université de Bourgogne); Alice Thomine-Berrada, curator in charge of collections, École des Beaux-arts de Paris; Lambert Dousson (ENSA Dijon)

To understand the trajectory of an artist, education is an important element: the school attended, the teachers and classmates, contribute to forging an identity, to influencing work and in situating the artist in an artistic and intellectual panorama. Yet there exist very few archives of artistic teaching after 1970. Thus artists who teach considerably redirect their methods of transmission in conceiving teaching as a dialogue, and in bringing to the fore the attention given to students and their approaches like giving them direction and structure, case-by-case and almost day-by-day. As a consequence, teachers don’t take prepared notes, nor do they conserve them in general.

Thus there is a lack of material traces to be able to address this nonetheless central element in the history of art. The consequence of this development for the discipline is major: since the 1970s, awareness of the formative years of artists tends to disappear from art history.

So this project seeks to create archives, in so doing, to offer researchers ways of thinking about this fundamental chapter of art history that represents teaching. To some extent, that is where the daily life of art, the artist and his/her practice is built up and redefined. This research programme aims to update the heritage, tradition, know-how and know-how-to-be that structure up to today the field of contemporary creation.

In relying on a body of teachers from different specialities, techniques and theories, heads of workshops, but also students, we would like to make up a representative panel of the diversity of methods, memories, vocabularies of artistic transmission. Opening the body to two fine art schools, Dijon and Paris, will allow reflexion on the invariants and specific features of these establishments. Questions concerning references, local footing, network and representation will also then be highlighted.

 

Detailed description of Action

How to learn to be an artist? What are the modes of that teaching and what is its historicity? To answer these questions, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the reality of classes and student life: one needs to consider the references, habits, gestures, exercises, methods of communication, the vocabulary used. So it is important to take into account what concerns attitude, gesture, be it technique or behavioural. That is why we have chosen to proceed with filmed interviews, which enable the capture of non-verbal elements and to be analysed in the light of discussions.

Furthermore, in order to make these interviews into accessible resources for everyone, and easy to use, first they need to be prepared. The interviews are transcribed, put into chapters, indexed, described, their information checked. They are online, respecting the open access policy, on the website of Laboratory LIR3S and the schools’ libraries. Lilian Vincendeau, IT technician at LIR3S will then format them and put them online.

The purpose of these interviews is to become primary sources mainly used by researchers and specialists of contemporary history interested in their diverse subjects: the chronology as well as the personalities and topics addressed in the conversations considered as sources are prone to bring light to a broad spectrum of questions.

Note: This project is built around an ANR project led by Déborah Laks (CNRS – Laboratory LIR3S) currently being elaborated and in which ENSA Dijon is a partner, “L’école de l’imaginaire. L’enseignement artistique en France, 1968-1999.”

 

Making research public

Research being a central activity at ENSA Dijon, the ARCs, seminars, study days, exhibitions, workshops are all an integral part of teaching and have as object, for some of them, the attribution of ECTS credits.

The diversity of ARCs on offer, along with the richness of the offering and frequency of workshops, which are shaped around external invited professionals (artists, designers, philosophers, anthropologists, researchers, writers, architects) makes ENSA Dijon into a particularly attractive and lively place, in direct contact with the art world and the issues of our times.

Study days and conferences, taking place over one or several days, allow a deeper understanding of theoretical, philosophical and/or social questions, and will lead to publications, conference proceedings, blogs, books and articles.

One goal is to generate, in collaboration with the centre for International Relations, international networking on these research subjects with places of research and creation throughout the world.

These intense moments in the life of an art school are also the high point in giving value to the research-creation inherent to questioning and challenges met at the crossroads of art, design and sciences (natural sciences and formal sciences, like human and social sciences).

Recent study days

• “Of the Group. Experiences and Fictions (with Olivia Rosenthal)”, 2022
• “Cross-experience. Relations with the Living (with Julie Desprairies)”, 2022
• “Music of the Future: sound technology, history, politics”, 2021
• “Contemporary Agoras. Alternative processes of construction of public space”, 2019
• “Figures of the foreigner, archives and current events”, 2018
• “On Sex Work”, 2018
• “Making Together”, 2017
• “Non-mixed, self-defence”, 2017
• “Back to the Land: reanimating our sensitivity to the living”, 2017
• “Contemporary Drawing”, 2016
• “Biomimicry: Science, Design and Architecture”, 2015
• “What Michel Foucault does to photography”, 2014

 

Latest publications

• Jean-Claude Gens (dir.), in collaboration with Pierre Ghislain, L’esthétique environnementale entre Orient et Occident, 2021.
• Lambert Dousson (ed.), Contemporary Agoras. Design, democracy and alternative practices of public space, Paris, Éditions Loco, 2020.
• Manola Antonioli (ed.) with the collaboration of Jean-Marc Chomaz and Laurent Karst, Biomimétisme, Paris, Éditions Loco, 2017.
• Philippe Bazin (ed.), Ce que Michel Foucault fait à la photographie, Setrogran, 2016.
• Manola Antonioli (ed.), Machines de guerre urbaines, Paris, Éditions Loco, 2015.

 

Latest exhibitions

• “Sound&Vision vs. Vision&Sound”(org. Jean-Christophe Desnoux, teacher ENSA Dijon, Nicolas Thirion, artistic director of Why Note, Centre de création musicale & artiste associé, ARC « Arts du Son », Frédéric Buisson, Artistic director of Interface Gallery), Dijon, 8 April – 15 May 2021.
• “River of no return” (org. Bruno Rousselot), Interface gallery, Dijon 23 March–20 April 2019
• “Painting in apnea” (org. Xavier Douroux–Director of Consortium Dijon, Pierre Tillet – ENSA Dijon and Astrid Handa-Gagnard – Director of FRAC Bourgogne), Les Bains du Nord – FRAC Bourgogne, 2017.