The Ninth School – Year Zero

What is a school of scenography? What can a school do?

Between utopia and fiction, a group of students from eight different French schools of scenography comes together – learning from diversity, feeding on the knowledge of others, and trying to imagine and invent together.

But for such a blended school to exist, what form is adequate for it to take? A form that goes beyond the usual fixedness of learning spaces and the separations already existing between our schools? Can we not invent a school with no fixed space, without the need to define itself and delineate its territory, but one that only works when in motion? A school of mobility, that moves and is constantly allowed to shift.

Such a school should have movement as method, porosity as quality, and infinite metamorphoses as sole finality. As a living organ, it attracts foreign bodies, ingests them and transforms them into new sustenance. Our school possesses, in this, its own vital organs – a brain, a space for record keeping and executive function, and an intestine, “the second brain”, a space for sensory comprehension and sensitive perception.

Both a moving van and a revived organism, returning from a semi-real, semi-fictive journey, the “Ninth School” does not come to a start or stop in Prague, but to a new step, a moment’s pause to start anew and to move toward contact with new connections. Each day, new proposals can be discovered, each day new knowledge can be shared within it. A convivial space where deceleration is allowed, where permanent motion does not imply speed or productive urgency. A nomadic toolbox where experimentation may take its time.

Website:
quadriennaledeprague2019.fr/en

Country/Region France

Curator Philippe Quesne

Artists Estelle Baverel – École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Malaquais, ENSAPM, Paris ; Ariane Chapelet - École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes, ensa Nantes, Nantes ; Bianca Da Costa – École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, EnsAD, Paris ; Shehrazad Dermé – École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, ENSATT, Lyon ; Lucie Mazières – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, Paris ; Camille Ranson - École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, ENSAPLV, Paris ; Simon Restino – Théâtre National de Strasbourg, TNS, Strasbourg ; Clothilde Valette and Léa Chardin – Haute école des arts du Rhin, Strasbourg – Mulhouse