Master Narratives and Experimentation / Speculative Narration

Coordination & teachings: Yvan Flasse.

Teaching staff: Xavier Garcia Bardon, Stéphane Noël, Peggy Pierrot,Nicolas Prignot.

+ 2024-2025 : Lou Colpe, June Laka.

Linked courses : Narratives and experimentation / Video seminar - Moving Images / Histories, practices, devices, Speculative Gesture

Offer more than defeat

We start from the observation that stories - all stories -, both in their content and in their structures, help to construct the ways in which we live, feel and inhabit the world.

Contrary to the dominant narratives of our time, our line of work is the notion of speculation, understood as the permanent search for light at the end of the tunnel, or as the fabrication of reasons not to give in to cynicism or despair. Provide reasons for hope.

Offering more than defeat in the ways of telling stories is the contemporary challenge that mobilizes us in this course; but without telling stories: narration is obviously not the only area of struggle.

Intentions, address and hospitality

In this workshop, we assert the need to implement intentional and addressed stories.

Each student joins this Master's degree with a desire to tell stories and an open project, populated by various intentions and references, gleaned during their previous career. The search and exploration of these avenues allows us to transform intuitions into intentions, which we keep active and question during the development of each person's stories.

We therefore claim both the pleasure of the story, its originality but also its non-accidental character. To this end, narrative construction tools serve to support the various projects developed, whether these take the form of still or animated images or even installations.

We reject the idea of a "universal" public, and we prefer the bet of an address, of an active and real receiver. The place where the author is located, the medium, the reception framework and its audience are in this sense part of our concerns.

We postulate that no story is self-evident, that it can be received in a context far removed from that in which it was produced and therefore be perceived differently. Works, whatever their relationship to form, must contain a way of welcoming both the subjects and their audiences.

We then intend to rely on a set of techniques, some as old as time: dramaturgy, the construction and articulation of images, the association and use of identifiable signs,...

Welcoming also means eliminating the effects of intimidation linked to the multiplication of scholarly references through the appeal to naivety as much as to bad faith, games of distancing and joyful affects.

We don't think that beauty, or taking the audience by the hand, is a problem in itself, what is important is how the form will serve the story we want to tell.

The need for intention, the importance of address and attention to hospitality make the workshop a place of friction and otherness rather than a place of listening.

Speculation

The term "Speculation" and even more so "Speculative Narrative" have been fetishized in recent years, which has led to many misunderstandings in its definition and expectations. In the context of the master's degree, it is not a question of trying to see narration in any plastic form, but of putting to work the transformative power of stories according to different modalities: what they produce on their author, how they can affect other stories, other situations, other relationships.

We insist on this reflex: not letting ourselves be defined by what we denounce so as not to renew forms of power, even through denunciation.

“Specula”, in Latin, is the “place of observation” which locates the one who observes, spies or watches. Speculation is in touch with real problems, it aims to be situated by the reality of our experiences of the world. It is not a question of utopia (which does not exist in any place), but of the creation of possibilities where they are lacking.

Speculating in narration is above all trying to bring about situations in the stories that we would like to see become real. It is experimenting with the consistency of our desires, through stories designed as laboratories, as experiences that are both sensitive and intellectual. Speculation is neither all-terrain nor free.

Pedagogy

To support students, we are setting up a dynamic of exchange and sharing:

- Regular meetings in sub-groups aim to formulate and articulate the unique universe of each student. Refusing the format of an individual meeting and a single teacher, they organize themselves into pairs;

- The presentation of specific questions, and the analysis of contemporary forms of narration echo the questions raised by the practices developed within the workshop and allow us to share our concerns and put them in resonance with those of the students ·s;

- Guest intervention allows intimate access to their issues and working methods;

- Workshops are an opportunity to bring students - from different artistic backgrounds and orientations - into contact and work in groups, around specific proposals or orders common to all students.

Educational team

As we do not reduce narration to a few canonical and established forms, our teaching team was formed in the complementarity of our practices, artistic and theoretical interests, refusing hierarchies of artistic categories. This allows us to accommodate the diversity of current issues and to double the exchanges between students and exchange teachers within the teaching team.