Frédéric Dumond / Karina Bisch et Thomas Clerc
Following the series Fiction / Performed Readings, initiated in 2008, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard is launching a new proposition to pursue the exploration of public speech. Partitions (Performances), which translates as Scores (Performances) in English, has been designed as an open seminar on artistic practices drawing its references and/or methodologies in knowledge related to art.
The project takes inspiration from artistic practices of teaching introduced by figures such as Joseph Beuys or John Cage, the multidisciplinary spirit of the experimental university Black Mountain College (from 1933 to 1957), as well as the philosophy of « popular universities » created in the eighteenth century with a view to making a general higher education accessible to all.
At the crossroads between art and human sciences, geography, history, linguistics, semiology, poetry, or literature, these « performed conferences » will involve a hybrid format, displacing scientific discourse and its systems into the realm of art.
This new program aims to accompany the development of a branch of artistic performance that relies on discourse and its oral dimension, occasionally bringing together gesture and image within an « augmented » form of conference. While the form is not completely new, its gradual constitution into a particular « genre » of performance is relatively recent.
Mixing Jacques Rancière’s theses on the « ignorant schoolmaster » and the comeback of the figure of the amateur (in the etymological sense of someone who loves), these singular forms of conference call into question a somewhat codified format and underline the obvious interest of artists in the reassignment of authorized knowledge.
