[2021] Proximité(s)/Nähe in Lyon 7

In 2018, Oliver Bulas and Annette Hans created the project How To: The Flow of Spirit in Order to Master the Unbridgeable and extended an invitation to artists to write announcements of fictitious workshops, together with a suggested exercice. These workshops, published in a booklet, have since been run in Hamburg, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro. With Proximité(s)/Nähe, Hans and Bulas teamed up with Veduta’s Adeline Lépine to conduct a further phase of this workshop series and create a dialogue between France and Germany. In Lyon’s Gerland district, in the Cité Jardin housing estate, as in Berlin’s Neukölln district, in the High-Deck Siedlung estate, workshops will be held 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 residents. The design of these sessions will be based on discussions held in advance; and on the collecting of experiences, expertise, life knowledge and needs relating to daily life in each district, and thus offer their residents new approaches to how they habitually use them.

The project is intended as a utopian experiment around the forms, emotions and tones that a future European public could take. It taps the recent history of post-industrial districts in Europe and how their mode of existence has been transformed amid economic, social, cultural and political contradictions that they are still wrestling with. These contradictions have given rise to complex everyday realities, stemming in part from the low-paid jobs or systemic precarious-work status dictated by industries’ activity or closure. In these contexts, the project considers subversion as a way to attain the ideal of emancipation. Each encounter thus aims to be an opportunity for gatherings powered by the hope of restoring social proximity, which seems to be gradually fading. Such gatherings – as a move to reach out to others, and beyond borders – are an act of resistance to the spread of segregation.

As part of the PERSPEKTIVE fund for contemporary art and architecture, an initiative by the visual arts office of the Institut Français in Germany. Supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Institut Français in Paris and the Goethe-Institut.
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The German artists’ visit to France was made possible by the Goethe-Institut in Lyon.

Supported by Lyon Métropole.

Photo : How To: The Flow of Spirit in Order to Master the Unbridgable, Berlin, 2019 © Oliver Bulas