La Fabrique des utopies concrètes

We invited the towns to put forward a candidacy to host a mini residence-mission. Each town was asked to formulate a shared issue and then to work on it with our team of artists in order to test their hypotheses, based upon which the future CLEA would be established: the idea was to anchor the residence-missions to the region by orienting them around a theme linked to issues of space and usage, and to establish a transversal working group (culture, sport, public spaces, community projects and social action) for hosting artists.

We chose to work on the theme of mobility, with the towns of Fosses, Louvres and Marly-la-Ville. During three days of workshops, ten of us — municipal employees, educators, residents and artists — used the time to get to know each other, to share our practices, and to observe the Fosses railway station and how it is used, before sitting down together to create a mini artistic intervention. Called "RER Change of Scene", it involved designing alternative RER tickets for journeys off the beaten track. We handed them out one early morning in March at the entrance to the Fosses RER railway station.