Culture pour tous

Colorier, simplement gÉant

Lanaudière Kids Colour Their World Kawaii Style

The Musée d’art de Joliette (MAJ) kicked off its summer season with the event Colorier, simplement géant. Two artists from the Paris-based Studiobüro collective came to give workshops and create a giant drawing inspired by the imagination of Lanaudière youngsters to be coloured in by the public.

In June 2009, the Musée d’art de Joliette (MAJ) unveiled a five-metre-wide black and white drawing created by members of France’s Studiobüro collective in collaboration with students at three elementary schools in the Lanaudière region, north of Montreal. All summer long, Museum visitors got to help colour in the drawing done by the illustrator Postics and artistic director Jérôme Sachs. The French artists’ two-week stay in Quebec gave them a unique immersion in the cultural world of kids in Joliette and the Atikamekw community of Manawan.

A few years earlier, the Museum’s Director General, Gaëtane Verna, had heard about Flyingcoloringwall at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It was presented by Studiobüro, an artists collective that creates graphic design projects involving the public. Impressed with the concept, she contacted Jérôme Sachs and began organizing a version tailored to the Musée d’art de Joliette.

The goal of Flyingcoloringwall is simple: to give everyone a chance to participate in a collective artwork and rediscover the fun of colouring. For each project, Studiobüro members, including the Japanese illustrator Postics (Ken Mizoguchi), draw a huge mural, which the public is then invited to help colour in. The artists adapt the subject and size of the drawing to the particular context and setting. They had started out with drawings three or four metres wide but gradually made them larger and larger. The one at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2006 was like a page from a giant colouring book—17 metres wide!

The challenge in Joliette

Though somewhat smaller in size, Joliette’s version of the project was no less ambitious. Here the challenge was to establish a long-distance, months-long dialogue between Studiobüro’s graphic artists and grade 5 and 6 students at École Sainte-Thérèse and École Les Mélèzes in Joliette and École Simon P. Ottawa in the Atikamekw community of Manawan. Catherine Dubois, the Musée d’art de Joliette’s educational curator, was in charge of coordinating the project and adapting it to the communities involved.

Joliette’s drawing had to reflect the lives of kids in the Lanaudière region. To provide the necessary background for the artists back in Paris, the Museum drew up a set of simple questions inspired by the Proust Questionnaire, made famous by the French writer Marcel Proust in 1890.

In naming their hero, their favourite movie, place, person, bird or flower, in describing their aspirations, dreams or fears, the kids revealed a lot about their culture, providing the artists with a large inventory of local cultural references. Some students also expressed themselves in drawings, while others created collages to depict their world. The Studiobüro artists had access to all this material in the months preceding their visit to Quebec. Another means of communication was a blog (projetcoloriersimplementgeant.blogspot.com) created by the artists and kids, especially the students at École Les Mélèzes, who added a French-language and computer training component to the art project.

At the end of May 2009, the artists arrived in Quebec for the final phase of this transatlantic collaboration. During the next two weeks, they gave creative workshops in the schools and did the final outline of the giant drawing that had been roughed out in Postics’ sketchbooks. A veritable mural of popular culture, the drawing featured a multitude of characters and cultural elements evoked by the kids in their questionnaires and artwork sent to the artists in France. Based on his preliminary sketches, Postics did a freehand drawing with a black felt pen on the sheet of paper spread out for several metres in front of him. His playful, naive motifs were inspired by popular culture and Japan’s kawaii aesthetic (which means “cute” in Japanese).

 

 

In the workshops, the artists also had the kids create masks inspired by the kawaii aesthetic and manga comics. Three of these workshops were given at the Musée d’art de Joliette and seven at École Simon P. Ottawa, in Manawan, where the artists and the Museum’s educational curator, Catherine Dubois, spent four days. The reserve, a three-hour drive north of Joliette, is home to almost 2,000 inhabitants on the shores of Lac Kempt in the heart of the Atikamekw Nation’s traditional territory. The Studiobüro artists were welcomed by the community, put up in the only residential hotel available for visitors, and immersed in a world that was very different from Joliette’s rural urbanity.

The artists would like to note the very personal welcome they received, the help provided by the teachers in their role as intermediaries, and the collaboration of École Simon P. Ottawa’s principal, Guy Niquay, and visual arts teacher, Jean-Claude Néquado. They also appreciate the enthusiasm shown by the students, who rarely have access to this sort of activity. It was an intense experience for the artists. Jérôme Sachs says it’s too bad that kids in better-off areas don’t always show an interest in the proposed projects, but that definitely was not the case in Manawan.

The Musée d’art de Joliette addresses several fields of action with this collective project, which wraps up at Les Journées de la culture 2009. The drawing will then return to France, leaving behind indelible traces of a contemporary community art experience that will strengthen the Museum’s role as an important anchor for the region.