Photo credit: Vladimir Kara
ACTA continued its exploration of the tree in 2023 at the Léon Blum secondary school in Villiers-le-Bel.
The project was aimed at students in years 7 and 8 (11-12 years old), to enable them to explore the tree through craft and visual arts. The theme – linked to Laurent Dupont’s diptych, the first part of which, “Le chant de l’arbre“, was created in January 2024 – was chosen to highlight the need for an introduction to ecological issues.
10 workshops were held between February and June 2023, with two artists: Vladimir Kara and Masha Schmidt. Masha Schmidt proposed the construction of a tree-sculpture, with particular emphasis on recycled paper and cardboard, the main medium for the collective creation. Vladimir Kara invited the students to create their own paintings of a tree after drawing inspiration from the many existing artistic representations.
The workshops ended with a monumental installation in the school: the tree-sculpture surrounded by the paintings created, symbolically representing the reverse path from paper to tree and from tree to forest.
A lecture on remarkable trees by Georges Feterman, President of the A.R.B.R.E.S association, was held on 6 June, as part of the project’s final presentation, followed by a viewing of the installation created by the two participating classes.
« « There was very good involvement from start to finish, and the complementary nature of the work was well received (“it’s creation and production: with Vladimir we imagine, with Masha we make…”). […] I was able to see from the parallel lessons that a number of concepts had been fairly well understood through the experimentation of a collective creation situation. »
Mr. André-Martin Lienhardt, arts teacher