Captures éditions

In this eighth title in the Digressions series Marie Preston speaks with Nora Sternfeld and Julie Pellegrin about her practice as a crossroads for art, education and cooperative working.

Marking Marie Preston’s residency at La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art, Digressions #8 maps the development of the exhibition Du pain sur la planche and the issues raised by the artist’s works in progress. Together with Nora Sternfeld and Julie Pellegrin, Marie Preston addresses the connection between co-creation and coeducation, the exhibition as workspace and her relationship with the experimental and the collective.

Digressions

Initiated in 2017 by Julie Pellegrin and the Centre for Contemporary Art team in collaboration with Captures éditions, Digressions is a series of interviews (bilingual French / English) that accompanies the programme. Through conversations with guest artists, the notebooks give behind the scenes access and bear witness to reflections, research, methodologies and sometimes the doubts and the trial and error that feed the working process. By giving a voice to artists, the entire collection brings out very singular voices that resonate with each other and explore shared questions around the performance and creation of exhibitions, the physical and political engagement and the decompartmentalization of disciplines.

For each issue, the colour of the cover paper is changed, with or without embossing, to distinguish the publication in relation to each artistic project. The inside pages are printed in one pantone tone and the switch to English language materializes in a double page image drawn from research work. Postcards from the exhibitions are printed and inserted randomly into the notebooks like bookmarks. Claire Moreux’s elegant and dynamic layout follows the meanders of reflection by inviting the reader to navigate, literally, through the text.

Biographies

Marie Preston is an artist, an associate professor at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University and a member of the Contemporary Arts and Images Laboratory and Teamed. Her Pain Commun (Communal Bread) project in Paris’s Saint-Denis district brings local residents and bakers’ apprentices together in a bread-making venture seen as a shared approach to “letting knowledge grow”. She is pairing this with an investigation into a network of experimental schools that sprang up in France in the 1970s and 1980s on a basis of self-governance, cooperation and openness to innovation

Vienna-born Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator and currently a professor at the School of Art and Design in Kassel. She is also co-director of the ECM Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts (Vienna) and a member of two research collectives, trafo.K (Vienna) and .freethought (London). She publishes widely on contemporary art, exhibitions, politics of history, educational theory and anti-racism.

Julie Pellegrin is the director of the Ferme du Buisson Centre fort Contemporary Art (2005-2020).