Charlotte Perrin

The discovery of a territory through sensitive experience, or how artistic practices enable one to apprehend, to understand and to personalise the world by placing the body and senses at the center of space. Public space and artistic creation: how does one create something that is common to all from an individual act of expression? How can public and collective space be both a space of exchange and of introspection?

The question "How is it, there?" is the starting point of this research-action conducted in Paris over the course of a month during Summer 2018. How do we discover a space? When can we say we know it? How do we remember a space, and how do we tell it? 

Because artistic creation is a means of knowing oneself and the world, and a means of communication, I decided to survey the city equipped with pencils and pastels. Attentive to the space around me, I trace, note, reinvent, remind myself. As I wander, observe, meet and research, a sensitive cartography is drawn up based on my aesthetic, emotional and cultural experience of the places I visit. I draw on location, from memory, experimenting with new techniques: it is a question of understanding space through curiosity and sensitivity. 

Thereafter, it will be a question of following the trace of the work carried out, of going back up the wire of the woven connections because in the generated cartography, there is no more time or space: anything could have happened. With reality as a backdrop, imagination has embroidered new patterns. Spaces have been transformed into sets, people into characters, conversations into dialogue.
Highlighting a work method generated organically in-the-doing will later allow intimate experiences to be shared with others. Exploring a given place with several people can become an opportunity to open up new perspectives, to multiply approaches, to enrich the stories and geographies of each person.

Public space, as place of plurality and the encounter of multiple visions, would then become the possible space where the intimate can arise, express itself, share itself. A place to create images that others, perhaps, will make their own, in their mental geographies.