ANdÉA Events

Cumulus Conference
Date: 5 June, 4pm-5.30pm
Location: Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2 All. Frida Kahlo, 44263 Nantes – Petit Amphithéâtre
/// This round table will be followed by a visit to the Nantes School of Fine Arts.

This session, which leaves room for interactive discussion, is organised for participants to get to know France’s vibrant design scene, in-the-making, through its publicly-funded art and design schools.

A cartography of the vast network of 44 schools, the majority of which have design departments, will be presented along with a handful of projects and programs that highlight their major spheres of interest and priorities. Within the art schools, practicing artists, designers and theoreticians guide experimentation and research, accompanying students to develop their personal project; these are key elements that unite the otherwise very diverse practices that this session will explore. The national network ANdEA, which collectively represents all the public Art and Design schools offering graduate and postgraduate studies in France, aims to reach out through this session to create opportunities for future partnerships on an international scale.

Speakers:
– Ulrika Byttner / co-president of ANdEA and director of École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen
– Helen Evans / artist, tutor and coordinator of Master programme Art, Environment et Public Situations at École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen and founder of HeHe art collective
– Frédéric Frédout / designer, professor and coordinator of Bachelor’s degree (years 2 & 3) and workshops on mixed territory at Beaux-Arts de Marseille
– Inge Linder-Gaillard / board member of ANdEA and director of Beaux-Arts de Marseille

Cumulus Association

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French public higher schools of art and design, under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture, offer design training to nearly 4,000 students each year across the country. Heirs to a centuries-old tradition, they combine a multitude of historical and contemporary skills. They are also the site where a new design pedagogy has been invented, at the intersection of art and society, based on personal research, experimentation, and connections with art and artists, many of whom teach in these schools.

28 schools provide training in all fields of design in 33 cities to 4.000 students, with very affordable tuition fees for accessibility to all.

French Art schools have a history that has helped nurture what they are today. Founded for the most part in the 18th and 19th centuries, as free drawing or painting schools, they made it possible to respond in parallel to the needs of building decoration, the necessities of manufacturing industries (ceramics, glass, fabrics, etc.), and to design new models each time new techniques of publishing, reproduction, production appeared. They trained in “the basic know-how essential” to every artist and craftsman and in the creation of forms for industry. Beaux-Arts schools have thus, from their origins, created a network covering the entire territory, in connection with the development of national and local manufacturing and industries.

Art schools thus simultaneously involved fine arts and vocational education. Free, loosely organized, and small, these schools were the laboratory, following May 1968, for a profound reform. Aware of the impact of Modern Art and the Avant-garde, the new Ministry of Cultural Affairs ended the gap between artistic training and the state of international creation, placing art and artists at the heart of pedagogy. It replaced the tradition of the “Master’s Studio” with a pedagogy based on personal research, experimentation, and collegiality. It established theoretical teaching and decompartmentalized training that had until then been highly professional with experimental approaches freed from academicism, reflecting what art itself had become.

Since the 1980s, and even more so today, pedagogy has also reconnected with technique. After providing freedom to its artists in training, we are now returning to increasingly tenuous connections with decoration and the crafts. Les Beaux-arts is, above all, a “creative environment.” A global vision, complex thinking, fiction, imagination, and multidisciplinarity are at the heart of our teaching methods. While 20th-century designers were often tasked with selling and facilitating industrial production, designers trained in our schools in the 21st century are questioning their productions and their responsibilities, and they are training and refining their sensitivity through art. To do this, art schools do not necessarily follow the direction of what the world wants (art world, economic sector, industry). Art schools embrace chance, a critical stance and the ability to transcend rules.

Anticipating the future through design also means opening our schools to the diversity of audiences who will accompany a changing society tomorrow, and above all, through equal opportunities, it means ensuring that the designers of tomorrow resemble our society in its diversity: we want the designers who will design our uses the day after tomorrow not all to come from a privileged social category with similar habits and biases.

 

ANdÉA
The National Association of Higher Schools of Art and Design

Established in 1995, the National Association of Higher Schools of Art and Design (ANdÉA) bring together the totality of the 45 Art and Design institutions. ANdÈA aims to be a platform for thought, a body of proposition and a force for the affirmation of the specific nature of teaching in the context of higher education in the domain of art.

In a context of the restructuring of the landscape of higher education, the network intends to promote and develop a unique model of teaching and research, which is characterized by the primacy of its reference to the field of art, to its values and its models – irreducible in this sense to the single field of higher education but capable, for this very reason, of enjoying a fruitful relationship with the self-same. ANdEA intends to fully and wholeheartedly contribute to the debate of contemporary ideas, by arguing in favor of the unique, emancipatory model of art schools, at a time when both education and creativity have become political, social and economic issues of the utmost importance.

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