The initial fieldwork and the establishment of a public art community , winter 2018
We began with fieldwork undertaken in collaboration with the city’s culture department, who commissioned the project, as well as all the local stakeholders involved both in urban development and art itself. Our objective: to work together to define the function of public art in a city and to set up a pluralist, open-minded community of stakeholders to nourish and carry the project forward.
First step: a workshop bringing together around sixty people, local government officials, cultural producers, urbanists, local tourism stakeholders, artists, social welfare organisations and cultural and urban facilitators, whom we invited to take part in the planning for the forthcoming public art programme in Saint-Nazaire. Together we worked on defining Saint-Nazaire’s pluralist public art programme. We shared experiences from elsewhere as a way of rejuvenating our way of envisaging art in the public space, as an enrichment of social, environmental and political values, seeking to broaden formats and frameworks for implementing our ideas. Together we came up with ideas for an art itinerary and the content of the programme, considering what already exists and what we would have to create. We laid the foundations for an itinerary entitled “No one sets off from 0!: From km 0 to Monsieur Hulot’s beach”, and came up with an unusual format for the study.
