Artist and teacher-researcher Marie Preston speaks with Nora Sternfeld and Julie Pellegrin about her practice as a crossroads for art, education and cooperative working.
Marking Marie Preston's residency at La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art, Digressions #8 maps the development of the exhibition Du pain sur la planche and the issues raised by the artist's works in progress. Together with Nora Sternfeld and Julie Pellegrin, Marie Preston addresses the connection between co-creation and coeducation, the exhibition as workspace and her relationship with the experimental and the collective.
Nora Sternfeld Vienna-born Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator and currently a professor at the School of Art and Design in Kassel. She is also co-director of the ECM Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts (Vienna) and a member of two research collectives, trafo.K (Vienna) and freethought (London). She publishes widely on contemporary art, exhibitions, politics of history, educational theory and anti-racism.
Marie Preston (born 1980, lives and works in Paris) is an artist and a research educator. Her projects exist in-between art and ethnography and are based on the exchange of knowledge and skills between all participants. Several projects are united under the name "Co-creation" and include exhibitions, workshops and other initiatives. All these events are united by the idea of collective action, which creates an opportunity for meeting, exchange, and interaction. By documenting experience of communication with different people, Preston explores the possibilities of creating spaces for a dialogue. Photographs, sculptures, performances and videos become instruments for capturing situations that arise during these actions. Preston is currently working on the project "Common Bread", which consists of a series of meetings, workshops and collective baking sessions. Preston connects environmental issues with alternative approaches to teaching, based on the example of a network of experimental schools established in new cities in France in the 1970s and 80s. The main principles of these schools are self-government, cooperation and openness. With Céline Poulin, she co-edited the book Co-Creation (Éditions Empire & CAC Brétigny, 2019) in cooperation with Stéphanie Airaud.
