Proximités - La Biennale de Lyon
In 2018, Oliver Bulas and Annette Hans created the project How To: The Flow of Spirit in Order to Master the Unbridgeable and issued an invitation tòartists to write fictitious workshop announcements accompanied by a suggested exercise. Published in a booklet, these workshops have since been implemented in Hamburg, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). With Proximité(s)/Nähe, Annette Hans and Oliver Bulas join forces with̀Adeline Lépine/Veduta to organise a follow-up to this series of workshops and create a situation of dialogue between France and Germany. In Lyon-Gerland, in the heart of the Cité Jardin, as in Berlin-Neukölln, in the High-Deck Siedlung, workshops will be carried out by artists, coming from Germany to France (Oliver Bulas, Cie Kuringa, Van Bo LeMentzel) or from France to Germany (Jan Kopp, LALCA & Les Inattendus, Félix Luna), with the inhabitants. These workshops will be designed on the basis of pre-organised exchanges, the collection of experiences, expertise, experiences and needs in relation to the daily life of each of the neighbourhoods in order to propose other ways of approaching the use of these neighbourhoods by their inhabitants.
The project is envisaged as a utopian experience of the forms, emotions and tones that a future European public could take. It draws on the recent history of post-industrial neighbourhoods in Europe and the transformations of their mode of existence in the face of the economic, social, cultural and political contradictions that still run through them. These have led to complex everyday realities, partly as a result of low-wage employment or systemic job insecurity linked to the activity or closure of industries. In these contexts, the project considers subversion as a possible means to achieve an ideal of emancipation. Each meeting is thus intended to be an opportunity for collective gatherings driven by the hope of re-establishing a social proximity that seems to be gradually being lost. In a process of opening up to others and overcoming borders, it constitutes an act of resistance to the spread of a dynamic of compartmentalisation.
In the framework of the PERSPEKTIVE Fund for Contemporary Art and Architecture, an initiative of the Office of Visual Arts of the French Institute of Germany. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, the French Institute in Paris and the Goethe Institute.
The visit of German artists to France was made possible by the Goethe-Institut Lyon.
With the support of the Metropolis of Lyon.
