Fresnoy

The Fresnoy or national Studio of the contemporary arts is a school and a place of exposure where one treats mainly video and new media. It is located at Tourcoing, in the agglomeration inhabitant of Lille.

The building

History of the place

Between 1905 and 1984, with Tourcoing and around, all revolved around the Fresnoy . Monday to Friday, the workmen trimaient in the textile factories. Saturdays, it was the market. And Sunday, after the mass, crowd pressed itself in Fresnoy to dance the hammer, to see films or to whistle the all-in wrestlers and also to patinate… to 6000 spectators per Sunday. Then in the Years 1970, the things started to disappear without being replaced. Factories close, the shops of district go bankrupt… all concentrates then in the large commercial complexes of the peripheries.

Rehabilitation

The building site of rehabilitation of the place and the installation of the school high-tech began in the end of the year 1980. The place opened its doors with the students in November 1997 and the public in April 1998. Fresnoy is installed on the site of an old complex of popular distractions from which the architect Bernard Tschumi built an entirely new building on the initiative of Alain Fleischer who had the idea to make of this building a school of a new kind. According to Tschumi, the old sports complex was not to be destroyed because it had value with the eyes of people and whom it made party of the history. Thus, it will set up a large roof high tech which allows, in addition to keeping the old buildings, to protect them.

New spaces

It is only thereafter (on models… etc) that the architect will realize that it has just created a new space, which will give another environment. This space is the “Interval”, i.e. space between the two roofs, a ballade that one offers to us in space time, a single, poetic place…

Its activities

A laboratory of experiments

Fresnoy privileges the practical experiment and not the theoretical lesson.

What Alain Fleischer calls the “pedagogy of the passage to the act”. This “laboratory of artistic experiments”, single in Europe, accommodates around fifty student-creators of the whole world, with the threshold of their careers, in order to help them to carry out their projects.

They have financings, of exceptional post-production and production equipments in all the fields of the image and the sound:

  • film set on floating flagstone of 1000m ²,

  • rooms of assembly,
  • numerical studio of sound creation,
  • auditorium of mixing film and video…

They also profit from the support of artist-professors invited such as Gary Hill, Jochen Gerz or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, which directs them, supervises them and which benefits them-even from the top-of-the-range material of the school to carry out personal works whose students become collaborators or assistants.

Invited intervening artists (nonexhaustive list)

Former students (nonexhaustive list)

  • Promotion JOHAN VAN DER KEUKEN - 2002/2004

  • Thierry Bernard
  • Olivier Boson
  • Blaise Bourgeois
  • Julien Coic
  • Cecile Dauchez
  • Nicolas Devos
  • Morgan Dimnet
  • Veaceslav Druta
  • Laura Erber
  • Carolina Goncalvez Pinto
  • Gaspard Hirschi
  • Yoshiaki Inatsugi
  • Jocelyn Creurer
  • Alexandra Melot
  • Sabrina Montiel-Soto
  • Jean-Marc Munerelle
  • Boris Nordmann
  • Surachai Pattanakijpaibool
  • Eric Pellet
  • Laurent Pernot
  • Samantha Rajasingham
  • John Gregg Smith
  • Atsuhiko Watanabe
  • Yannig Willmann

Expos

Fresnoy has vast spaces of diffusion and of programming, thus the great Nave and its additional spaces present each year three exposures of international scale and various events (spectacles, concerts, conferences…).

Among these demonstrations that entitled Panorama which is held each year at the end of June/at the beginning of July, during which Fresnoy exposes and programs works of its young artists and invited artist-professors, produced during the year.

External bond

http://www.lefresnoy.net/

Random links:Gellin | Postscript (television program) | Shelley Hack | Paul Larocque | Tiodže | Charenton,_Louisiane