An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
Drawing is widely understood as a means of knowing, a way to knowledge.
This class promotes drawing as an experimental, investigative and exploratory contemporary medium.
Rather than focusing primarily on observation or the acquisition of technical skills, we will consider drawing as a practice of inquiry: a way of investigating, questioning, and making sense of our surroundings.
One of the aim of our 5 sessions is to reestablish the materiality of drawing as a medium of action and embodied experiences that contribute to make our today overwhelming environment more accessible.
At a time when virtual, on-line, and electronic media dominates visuality and communication, we will reaffirm drawing practice as a zone of inquiry, discovery, and exploration, even of reveries that help architects reflect on questions around how we should live in this world, and what this world could be like.
The milestone French author Georges Perec will be our mentor. We will adapt to drawing his practical exercices, his methods for observing, describing, and understanding the city of Paris. Through these exercises, we will explore Paris and elaborate sensitive maps/drawings that emerge not only from geography, but from experience, perception, memory and dérive/Drift.
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Schedule - 4h class every 2 weeks - 14h-18h
30/10/26 - 14h-18h
14/10/26 - 14h-18h - exhibition Georges Perec BNF - https://www.bnf.fr/fr/agenda/georges-perec-modes-demploi
04/11/26 - 14h-18h
18/11/26 - 14h-18h
02/12/26 - 14h-18h
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A specialist in the play of language and the manipulation of graphic and sound signifiers, Georges PEREC is the author whose work is intimately linked to Paris. He made Paris the setting for most of his texts and films. The city is a key material for his writing, as the titles of all his texts clearly reveal: Lieux, Les Lieux d'une fugue, Les Lieux d'une ruse, Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien, Espèces d'espaces...
Georges Perec, who described himself as a ‘user of space’, keen to understand how Paris works, used the city as a playground for literary experimentation. In Espèces d'espaces, he provides a number of possible ways of using Paris, advising us, for instance, to sit on a café terrace, pull out a notebook and write down everything we see. The ordinary, and more importantly the ‘infra-ordinary', what we no longer pay attention to because it seems so banal, mundane and yet, which forms the very essence of the city.
--- this class is an invitation to reconsider the obvious
we will walk and explore different districts, as well as pratice different drawings protocols. This class expects work space and time other than during the scheduled classes. Class period is the time to exchange around the progression of your work from weeks to weeks