Research and Creation Workshops (ARC)

ARCs are interdisciplinary collective times based on a defined research problem and to which everyone contributes.

The educational objective is to prepare students for the practice of research in art and design, emphasizing the methodological, contextual, conceptual and practical specificity of such research.

Among the themes of the ARCs, some deeply nourish the school both on the theoretical and on the plastic level. The gestures transmitted in the school find, by their richness and diversity, a particularly sharp resonance with regard to many issues related to artistic but also societal practices. Thus, constant back and forths take place between the Lab with its 3D prints and the ceramic workshop with its molding practice. The dialogue also takes shape between the video workshop, in particular its 3D experiments, and AI which questions more traditional expressions in painting or drawing.

ARC Chromoculture – Cultivating color through art and design

Visual: ARC Chromoculture

With Cécile Vignau, Flavie Cournil, Clara Guislain, Arnaud Dubois (speaker, researcher at the CNRS) and Clara Salomon.

As synthetic color pollutes the air and many waterways around the world, this project proposes to collectively reflect on ecological coloring practices. Started in 2021 with a reconfiguration of the workshops Silver Dyeing and Development, the heart of the project is located in the park of Ensad Limoges with the laboratory garden "Chromoculture". Composed of around 50 different species of colored plants, it was imagined by the artist-botanist Liliana Motta in collaboration with the students of the ARC (design, layout, mulching, planting) and the help of local actors (farmers, associations, local authorities, etc.).

In 2024-2025, the ARC continues through various collective and individual projects that engage students in the conceptualization of personal research around the issues raised by the ARC. Chromoculture : current sources of ecological colours, pollution of waterways and air due to the dye industry, pollution due to mining industries, relationship to the colour heritage and geology of the region, botanical research on coloured plants, work of documentation of the project in the form of photos, silver films and editions with low environmental footprints.

To support their research, students can participate in different projects: enrichment of the laboratory garden, workshops (plant colors, phytography), outings with the artist Mathias Mareschal to harvest and use local lands and rocks, a day of experimental film screenings by theLight Cone Association, as well as a trip planned for spring 2025. Two project-based residencies are offered to students with local partners (Lainamac and Got mill). Occasional meeting times are planned with the ARC Experience of the territory to cross common and complementary issues.

ARC Chromoculture was supported for two consecutive years (from 2021 to 2023) by the professionalization system “ CulturePro » from the Ministry of Culture. From 2023 and for the next 3 years, the project is supported by aid from the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region as part of its call for projects “ Promoting student success ».

ARC Artificium

Monika Brugger, Terhi Tolvanen, Fabrice Caravaca, Ken Peat and Jean Savard.
Speakers for the Hochschule Trier – Campus Idar-Oberstein : Julia Wild, Cornelia Wruck, Levan Jishkariani, Theo Smeets.

THE ARC Artificium explore a City of Craft! is an interdisciplinary project funded by the program "Internationalization of Universities of Applied Sciences (HAW. International)", a program of the DAAD-German Academic Exchange Service, in collaboration with Ensad Limoges.
Through the interdisciplinary project Explore a City of Craft! en
collaboration with Hochschule Trier, Campus Idar-Oberstein, in Germany, the ARC Artificium invests different aspects of two Craft
Cities: Idar-Oberstein and Limoges.
These two cities mark their respective territories by a specialization via a “craft” and specific materials on an economic, social and cultural level.
For centuries, the techniques of gemstone working have been developed and passed on in Idar-Oberstein and those of porcelain in Limoges. To this day, this translates into a wide range of applications ranging from simple but highly specialized craft techniques to innovative technologies, such as computer-aided work, automatic machines, as well as the
development and processing of synthetic gemstones or new materials in the field of porcelain.

The group, composed of students from the POPatelier Bijou and guest students, focuses its research on porcelain during the first semester, in different stages (manufacturing of shapes and their molds, casting, coloring). These phases serve as a basis for an exchange with students from Idar-Oberstein in the second semester during the two-week exchange planned for 1.

Throughout the year, students will document their research and collect “treasures”, that is, typical objects, products, vestiges of past eras, from the context of their respective crafts.
The aim is to explore, to make visible the territories, geographical and geological, and their influences on the economic project, with various manufacturing structures (workshop, factory or factory) that have influenced socio-cultural and political life, but also the transmission of knowledge. It is also planned to document specific techniques, to make visible the intuitive gestures of independent craftsmen and women workers, taking care not to only use photography or video. It is about thinking about how to represent the course of actions in an innovative or unexpected way, so that the implicit knowledge of the action is also intuitively understandable, with the aim of later making them available to external users via a visualization portal or digitization of implicit knowledge.
During the year, former artists in residence, guests (Marion Delarue) or students from Idar-Oberstein or Limoges (Jean Savard, Manon Papin, Elvire Blanc-Briand), present their respective experiences by means of a video platform and show to what extent the environment of a Craft City rich in traditions has influenced their artistic work.
The research will be presented to students in the partner city on a regular basis in 2025 and will serve as the basis for an exhibition in Idar-Oberstein and Limoges, as well as a catalogue that will make the results visible beyond the university.

ARC New gestures

Indiana Collet-Barquero, Fabrice Cotinat, Jessie Derogy and Benjamin Sebbagh.

New Gestures places the gestures of ceramics crafts as "living archives" and sources of study that nourish creative work in connection with immersive, robotic, digital technologies and with generative artificial intelligences in the fields of art and design. This located research program takes as its point of support the territory of Limousin as a living corpus of traditional know-how and innovations related to ceramics and wishes to engage a strong link with the Iberian Peninsula.
Based on crossed exploratory modalities (immersion, experimentation, investigation, harvesting and archiving) on ​​the gesture, the objective is to bring out processes in the process of transformation that students at Ensad Limoges can reinvest in art and design in a logic of hybridization of practices.

The idea of ​​objectifying a new continuum in the field of production and creation in art and design observes two sides. One develops a documentary content of the gestures of trades, "living archives" for which we constitute a repertoire of gestures, words, events, traces, practices and creation related to the work of ceramics. The other side, with an experimental aim, uses immersive, digital technologies and robotics (3D printing, VR-AR, VR, algorithms, automation, generative artificial intelligence, metaverse) as tools for creation and development from the activation of documentary sources.

This ARC places students in different situations of investigation, meeting and learning of know-how related to ceramics: economic and cultural actors, production companies, research work, etc. in the Limousin region, but also nationally and Europeanly. In addition, students exploit the possibilities of interaction related to the capture of movements and generative artificial intelligences, these interweaving traditional know-how with cutting-edge digital tools. The results expected with these technologies are directly exploited in the creations of art and design students.

THE ARC New Gestures, which unites knowledge production (research) and creative transformation (action) based on the gestures of ceramics, seeks to expand the field of practices and technical knowledge through new technologies, but also through the sharing and analysis of individual and collective experience. Thus, the cross-methodologies and inter-category cooperation desired by the ARC Nouvelles Gestualités not only allow us to revisit the relationship to knowledge, but also seek to open up other avenues in the ways of "making".

In 2023 and 2024, the ARC Nouvelles gestualités is supported by the professionalization system CulturePro from the Ministry of Culture. In 2024, it will also benefit from an allocation under the title of theCall for projects Research in higher schools of art and design (RADAR).

ARC Images & co-imaginaries – The place of images

With Delphine Gigoux-Martin, Clara Guislain, François Coadou, Pierre-Emmanuel Meunier.

If the image, in its history, is a form that brings back the absent or makes the present appear, it is a substitution that in its representation formulates an act. For Hans Belting, the fact that we live with images and that we apprehend the world through images can only be completely understood in the formula image-medium-body. The experience of the body as a living medium is then fundamental in the experience that it allows of the perception of images. In these crossed perspectives of – “the image is act” (Henri Lefèvre) and the image body medium – the human being who is touched by the image and its effects, in turn provokes an interaction with it. This power of “the action of images” (Philippe Descola), is established through a complex dialectic where the producer of the image, the image itself, the spectator who looks at it and the cultural context in which production and reception take place, produce expressions of different meaning according to the historical, cultural or social contexts. Michel de Certeau sets out a heterological epistemological perspective that removes the image from any univocal identity logic and insists on the perpetual transformation and redefinition of the image. Thus the meaning of an image would never be given once and for all and would come from multiple factors where the encounter and confrontation take force. The image then implies an act of reception of its contemplation that triggers actions and reactions in the observer, giving images an active nature in their constitutive role of experience: "Images cannot be situated in front of or behind reality, since they contribute to constructing it. They are not a derived reality, but a form that constitutes a necessary condition of reality" (Horst Bredekamp).

So, in these experiences of the image and their effective power, can the image, in its relationship to the place, to its location, provoke other sensitive experiences open to the multiple worlds that we inhabit and that inhabit us?

This year, we would like to ask ourselves the following question: is there a good (and therefore also a bad) image? A question that is willingly provocative, because it discriminates, because it introduces notions of value. Is it possible, however, to avoid it? Cultural Studies have popularized the idea that there is a relationship of interdependence, even of reciprocal determination, between manufactured images and these other images that we call mental images. Manufactured images express our intellectual and cultural representations, and shape them in return. So much so that they should certainly not be taken lightly. Does this mean, from then on, that manufactured images will have to be brought before the tribunal of a certain politics and a certain morality?
But which ones? What will be their foundations? And will it then only be a matter of examining the content, the representations they convey? Or will it also be necessary to examine their aesthetics, their poetics? We had a question, now here are a large number. To answer it, we rely on a few experiences from different moments in the history of art and culture, from medieval images to mainstream media images, and on their subversion and minority reappropriation, including Dadaist and Surrealist collages and photomontages.

ARC Territory Experience – What we are connected to

Visual: ARC Expérience du territory, photo credit: Estelle Majani.

With Vincent Carlier, Nicolas Gautron, Dominique Mathieu.

We approach water as a vector, a network, a hair of connections on the sensitive scale of a territory, geographical but also social and personal. During our explorations open to what happens, to follow a course and its ramifications, we experiment with what we are connected to. We experience our connections, our fertile dependencies that irrigate us, to the environment of which we are a part. And from these dependencies, we make a force and a resource generating ideas, collective power, possibilities.
With reference to Three ecologies by Félix Guattari, we explore the way in which these interconnections manifest themselves according to different approaches: relationship to the environment and to the living, relationship between people and between collectives, relationship to the intimate and to the sensitive.
We question existing and inventive forms to join, connect, meet, receive, translate, interpret, represent, make assemblies of all presences. We pose the hypothesis of the practice of walking as a communal field, our space-time of the inter, of the relationship.
We accompany Tibo Labat, artist-architect in residence in the fall of 2024, in his commitment to creating connections and cooperation between diverse worlds, a practice he calls marches-composition, with the printed object as a support for sharing and intervention.

As Sabu Kohso said in his book Fukushima & its invisibles :"The capitalist economy was built on the commodification of the commons, as well as on the transfer of waste to the territories of the poorest. The more capitalist societies develop, the more they lose their capacity to recycle what they produce in excess, thus relegating the negative to the realm of the invisible - the air, the ocean, the subsoil, the economically inferior territories."
It is also to these negative commons that we are all connected. This is why we are going to meet an infrastructure to which we are connected, the Energy Recovery Unit of the Limoges agglomeration, in other words the waste incinerator.
The Vienne descends from the mountain to arrive in the city. We seek by a reverse path to leave Limoges in order to go back to the sources by condensing our gaze, at the same time as the river narrows, to gain acuity on the world that composes us. The landscape being always caressed in the same direction by the river, we seek, through walks and movements against the current, to develop our own orientation maps to go to meet elsewhere, return on board, look at the beauties, leave the protective shelter, not let ourselves be carried by the flows and take a position.

Photo credit: Estelle Majani