The first powerful act of this event is that of its integration within public space, the place where gender inequalities play out, hegemonic masculinities, the banalisation of the harassment of women, and avoidance strategies. Through this act, we aim to participate in the new dynamics of participatory democracy such as women’s marches. While the geography of gender has demonstrated that urban space is a sexed territory where women have always maintained complex relationships with the city, this Biennale is intended as a site of symbolic appropriation. A site in which artists’ and architects’ works sketch out new urban practices and fall tangibly within the space of the city, its heritage, squares, and loci of sociability and leisure activities. Beyond that, this Biennale hopes to cultivate the ability for artworks to inhabit the city and be combined with the practices of everyday life. Within the perspective of a vast experiment on the scale of reality, we would like the artwork to form an event beyond the spaces traditionally dedicated to art.

This exhibition inscribes the reflections of the Biennale “Infinite Freedom, A World for a Feminist Democracy” in a theoretical and historical lineage around architecture, with its manufacturing of territories and its utopias. The title pays homage to the multiple meanings of the word “world” in the writings of Hannah Arendt, understood as the construction of a community among human beings. The “man-made world” of the philosopher’s text is transformed to reference women’s work, but also to recall the role of language in becoming visible and in the power to act.

The Woman-Made World presents a series of architectures that we consider emblematic in conceptualizing our place in the world, as a space of relationship, roots, and dreams.

Through conceptual and empirical projects, the architects presented here question the concept of modernity inherent in the discipline. They reestablish a place for use and custom, long supplanted by architects’ fantasizing.

Between the architecture of impermanence of Saba Innab and the architecture of relationship of Renée Gailhoustet and Iwona Buczkowska, this landscape sketches a new semantics of the act of “dwelling” and of “building.” The holistic vision of Tatiana Bilbao, the cognitive environments of Angela Hareiter, and the disaggregated forms of Zaha Hadid cohabit in this exhibition of approaches, sometimes anachronistic in relation to each other, but nonetheless necessary to the history of architecture.
Through this first narrative, perhaps it might be possible, in the words of researcher Stéphanie Bouysse-Mesnage, to “look at what gender makes of architecture.”

Based on these observations one could doubt the laws and manners of these early men, since the most enlightened have not been able to agree on the subject. I, ignorant as I am, wish to attempt to go astray as others have. And who knows whether or not I will come across the truth?
Olympe de Gouges, Lettre au peuple, 1788-1789

Feminism, with its great diversity, is offered in multiple forms – there is not just one feminist path. Since the late seventeenth century, the question of the rights, citizenship, and emancipation of women has been posed through political, social, and anticolonial struggles. If this biennial wants to overcome its singular relationship to the history of artand to use the concept of feminist democracy to update the interpretation of the discipline, it therefore needs to question the new practices of equitable citizenry, the role of women in the creation of cities and territories, while taking into account the specific history of Vierzonnaises. Indeed, considering their social existence, their role in the public sphere, through education, the economy, sociability, and labour, and concerning ourselves with their role as “collective agents” is of the utmost pertinence.

Exhibition at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire in Orléans 16/09/2022 05/02/2023

The encounter between these two terms imposes itself as the obvious conclusion of the transformations of art in an unstable and fragile world. Subversive tenderness is, in the exhibition[n1] , the contemporary alternative to the modernist avant-garde.
The French dictionary Le Littré teaches us that tenderness is Nature: “no scissors, potter’s wheel, or paintbrush can approach the tenderness with which nature turns and rounds off its subjects.” But it also tells us that it is Culture: “once said of the softness, delicacy, and lightness of the paintbrush or scissors.” So here we have Nature & Culture conjoined in tenderness. On the one hand, the decor of a reality that accommodates our lives: architecture, town planning, industry, leisure time… In short, what we do. On the other hand, Nature, which hosts within its world a foreign world: ours. The meeting of these two worlds provokes a friction, a tension that so far seems to be a flop, if not a disaster.

Mónica García Martínez, María Jesús Muñoz Pardo, Beatriz García Bustamante et leurs étudiant·es.

The fundamental pedagogical objective of this course is to use project practice to question the relationship between art and architecture, its insertion into urban reality and its impact on social space. The selection of a non-abstract urban context is essential. The public space is proposed as a research laboratory. Boundaries will be established in order to focus the work on a specific fragment of an urban-social reality.

Laure Tixier, Frédéric Herbin et Eric Aupol et leurs étudiant·es : Agathe Flamant, Juliette Duval, Yuan Hong, Alice Le Quellec, Xilong Cao et Yu Zhiming.

“The idea is to occupy the city and some of its sites and spaces, and define or physically construct alternative spaces to allow a unique geography of the territory to be established. Vierzon has a working-class social and political history (Vierzon la Rouge / Vierzon the Red). Just as certain bodies retain the memory of actions from past productions, some architectures can be read as traces of this history, palimpsests of what the industrial fate of the country once was, up until its gradual decline. A central hub for railways and motorways, Vierzon is also a place where rivers meet. These intersections are also the signs of a cartography, a topography that unfolds and creates potential encounters and unusual times and spaces.