As the “Project” module of Neoma’s international Art Management Master program in Rouen, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington designed a workshop program called Rouen Art-Based Urban Lab. Students, Chinese in a broad majority, were focusing on the specific site of the future St Sever Station, meant to be rehabilitated and to host a new high speed train line to Paris by 2025, thus integrating Rouen in the Greater Paris area. This vast and desolate land is currently being redesigned via a Europan architecture competition which selected in 2013 a dozen of European teams (composed of architects, urban planners, and landscape designers) to develop urban solutions, and three teams were awarded by Europan’s final jury in December 2013. Taking the Greater Paris as their common future horizon, each of the proposals included a creative and artistic program to be further developed. Neoma’s students thus had to imagine various cultural engineering solutions that would complement the work of architects while being consistent with Rouen’s creative development policy.
- Europan website: http://www.europan-europe.eu/fr/session/europan-12/site/rouen
Neoma workshop steps:
- Visits and User Experience (UX) reports on a selection of creative hotspots in the Greater Paris area in order to get a sense of its very vast scale (materials for the GP Creative Constellation Inquiry)
- Discovery of the St Sever Site, presentation of the three Europan laureate proposals and of the cultural strategy of Rouen (by Sophie Noël, head of Cultural Affairs at the City of Rouen).
- Critical analysis of the context, documentary and international best-practice research serving as sources of inspiration, and definition of a curatorial line.
- Design of artistic and creative projects (content, implementation, agenda, budget, etc.), and investigation about potential partners or professionals to be consulted, and/or invited for the “open lab” session.
- Final restitution in an open-lab session in discussion with a panel of experts including Sophie Noël (City of Rouen), Isabelle Mouling (Director of Europan France), Nicolas Bard (founder of Ici Montreuil creative residency which specifically inspired the Neverland project), Denis Darroy (Director of Rouen Pôle Image), Hélène du Mazaubrun (Museology researchers, University Paris Descartes), etc.
The 5 projects designed by the students teams, were playing with the different temporalities of the urban site development. Some could take place as early as today with very limited means; others could be scheduled along the transformation of the site and its socio-cultural mutation; others could be planned in or inaugurate the future constructions and station’s infrastructures to better integrate them in the Greater Paris constellation. In that respect, the research served as a good sample study for the development of all the future Greater Paris stations.
Contact LIID for further information about the projects.
A critical analysis of the Rouen Art-Based Urban Lab re-contextualized in the Paris Galaxies project and the development of the future Grand Paris Express transportation lines, was presented in March 2014 by Raphaële Bidault-Waddington in the doctoral seminar “Images, Imagination and Urban Strategies”, as part of the series “Stations Mirroring the City” (Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech, LVMT, LATTS).
Seminar program (in French): http://www.latts.fr/sites/default/filesystem/files/seminaire_gares_11_mars_2014_programme.pdf
Contact LIID to view RBW’s presentation “Waiting for the Station, Waiting for the Greater Paris: artistic experimentations and the making of the city’s imaginary”.
Then the Rouen Art-Based Urban Lab”, and more specifically the Neverland project (offering a new generation of art residency), was then presented at the “Europan Planet: the Competition and After…?” conference at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris on April 11th, 2014.
View conference program (in French): http://www.citechaillot.fr/fr/auditorium/conferences_et_debats/les_debats_des_expositions/25516-planete_europan.html