The collaborative pieces made in our on-site workshops emerged through a two-step process. The first was what could be called a residency where we worked with local groupings to develop ideas. The second was their execution and reproduction. These interventions covered the construction site surfaces made available to us – walls, pillars and fences – throughout the course of the year 2016.
From May 9-13, 2016, members of the Douze Douze artists’ collective led co-conception workshops involving young people from associations, neighborhood centers, art/youth spaces, schools and recreational programs to make posters, stencils and paintings to cover the southern side of the wall surrounding the RER A (Nanterre Université) train station.
In partnership with Cultiver la ville and the EPADESA, the Douze Douze collective invited people from the neighborhood to tell the story (and their own stories) of how Nanterre arose from the empty lots and shantytowns that once marked this area. On this basis the artists wrote a narrative and imagined the large figures that would be painted on the construction site walls in order to allow the contributions by 20 different groupings to cohere into an ensemble.
