Faire, encore
Faire, encore, the Art Design Recherche (AD•REC) 2025 conference, will take place at the École supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Étienne (Esadse) at the Cité du design during the 13th edition of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne, entitled: Ressource(s), présager demain.
It has two components: a colloquium to be held on May 27 and 28, 2025, and an exhibition.
The call for participation is open to submissions on the ScienceConf platform until December 20, 2024.
An invitation to pool research work that is probing the "ways of doing and making" prevalent in contemporary creation
"Thought is always about experimenting, not interpreting, but experimenting, and experimentation is always about the current, the nascent, the new, what is happening now." Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers, 1990, p. 144
The AD•Rec 2025 conference is principally aimed at artist and designer researchers teaching in art and design schools. It is an invitation to pool research work that is probing the "ways of doing and making" prevalent in contemporary creation, by looking at both practices (creative research) and theoretical studies. How can creative practices actively enhance living environments? Do art and design currently describe those environments? Do they contribute to preserving and perpetuating them? The research discussion we are preparing starts from the hypothesis that creatives have a role in to play in designing the transformations in societies, in particular those working out of art and design schools and thanks to the expression of their students’ creativity.
At the beginning of this decade, we were given a taste of "doing nothing" when the movement of people and goods was suspended and the combustion of fossil fuels curbed by the pandemic. This fleeting interlude rekindled the idea that unappealing futures – which are already invading our present – might be replaced by imaginative alternatives. Multiple, fragmentary, collective, cautious or adventurous, propositional and forward-looking ways of doing and making are being embraced in art and design schools, creating a genuine research community, which this conference will seek to represent, interpret and promote.
At a time when the weight of human constructions has now exceeded the weight of the biomass on the earth’s surface, how can we decide what we have the right to "still do", in spite of everything? It is vital to limit the artefacts that weigh on the planet. But the human appetite for significant and beautiful objects is not going to go away. Creativity has a place apart from industry and can be conceived as a non-harmful mode of action. So where do things stand?
The research being done in art and design schools offers a rich panorama of attempts to invent modes of action through the creative process. In this it is wholly in line with the students’ hopes and expectations. They inhabit living environments marked by geopolitical iniquity and climate injustice. They are experimenting with the first stages of uninhabitability: temperatures of 50° in our cities, water shortages, devastating floods, the sixth mass extinction. They feel the urgent need to imagine as yet unknown ways of doing and making, living and being, and they are using every medium – plastic, pictorial, graphic, digital, visual – to do so. This is leading to discoveries of other ways of doing and making things, elsewhere and with unexpected creative partners. Notions like care and frugality, a restored relationship with the living world, gender studies, ecofeminism and decolonial studies have converged. A part of creative efforts now seems to be directed towards attempts to regenerate living environments.
The conference itself will be accompanied by an exhibition. This will be a research exhibition. That is to say that it will aim to show and share the "doing" part of research. How do we do research through a creative process? How do we act through that research? How do we share that research? Four cross-cutting themes relevant to different areas of creativity and research will be addressed.
