Jocelyn Cottencin : Just a Walk, 2007

26 January – 25 March 2007

France, Spain, Portugal, Scotland

Jocelyn Cottencin

born in 1967 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Rennes, France

For the 2005-2006 cycle, La Criée has invited Jocelyn Cottencin to create an artistic project on the idea of the circulation between and stays in the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao in Spain, Lisbon and Porto in Portugal and Glasgow in the United Kingdom.

Jocelyn Cottencin’s artistic project starts from the simple idea of being open to elsewhere. To walk at random is to experience unknown paths and as opposed to linear itineraries it may lead to more unexpected and rich encounters. It also implies the readiness to leave the habits of movement behind, the rituals of work which can sometimes enclose spaces into too rigid borders. As a metaphor of circulation and exchange, Just a Walk raises the essential questions of territory, as much in its reality as in the images it generates:

• The desire to circulate generated by the project Just a Walk does not imply a desire to meet the other in order to define an ideal or uniform territory. Just a Walk is a project where friction, difference and contradiction all have a place. To provoke meetings and openings is a true personal and political commitment towards and with the other. It is to take the risk of tension and rupture but also that of construction and the possible.

• Just a Walk is an artistic project which will put into focus the notion of territory itself, from the conception of the project through its various research declinations right through to its public showing. Jocelyn Cottencin will, in fact, offer:

  A time for public visibility with an exhibition and a choreographic event in Rennes.

• Art projects: Some are already in place, others need to be developed according to the progress of Just a Walk. These artistic proposals include both individual productions of the artist (Short stories in Europe, Masse…) as well as an appeal to other artists to produce and create new works.

• Specific work modalities: Research and meetings with contemporary art professionals and artists ; research and production residences abroad ; research workshops with other artists and theoreticians in Rennes…

As a metaphor of circulation and exchange, Just a Walk raises the essential questions of territory, as much in its reality as in the images it generates:

• How to cross a territory?

• Is a territory made of normative identities or is it a product of the imagination within a flow of fluctuant and contradictory desires

• Could a territory not originate from a movable and extensible length according to various different configurations?

• How to think of territory with the onset of globalisation?

• Has territory anything to see with margin and center?

• Can I experience territory through the vital space which I am allowed, by myself or by others, to live in?

• Is territory a matter of negotiation from a collectivity to share?

• And if territory were finally only a belief matter, a necessary utopia?