Photo credit: Vladimir Kara
This project was aimed at secondary school students (Collège Martin Luther King in Villiers-le-Bel) and high school students (Lycée René Cassin in Gonesse), to enable them to approach the theme of the tree – central to Laurent Dupont’s forthcoming creations – through encounters with works of art and different artistic points of view.
Two visual artists, Vladimir Kara and Masha Schmidt, conducted workshops from March to May 2022 with the students, and two conferences on the theme of the tree with Georges Feterman, president of the A.R.B.R.E.S Charity were offered as an introduction and conclusion. This meeting allowed the students to express their sensitive apprehension of the world, to be placed at the heart of the reflections on the environment and climate change, and of the creative approach.
Their [the students’] investment was very positive, and some of them particularly “revealed” themselves through these proposals. They enjoyed expressing themselves “without limits”, solicited by the profusion of materials provided in the two workshops, thus soliciting and re-launching their research and inventiveness, but also questioning their “intimacy, as one pupil put it: “The tree is like me, it is uprooted!”
Noémie Quelo, Arts teacher