Making, Still Making. The Art Design Recherche (AD•Rec) conference 2025 will be a feature of the Biennale with a symposium and an exhibition. The exhibition invites teacher-researchers at French or foreign art and design schools to share plastic proposals resulting from their investigations. It questions the way the creative sector is doing things today in terms of transitions.
This panorama of experiments reflects the concerns that lead students to creative schools. Growing up in environments afflicted by geopolitical iniquity and climate injustice, they are faced with the first stages of inhabitability: the 50°C city, water shortages, destructive flooding, the sixth mass extinction, etc. The situation is driving them to imagine objects and signs that will give meaning to as yet unknown ways of doing things, living and being, through all media, plastic, pictorial, graphic, digital and visual. Experiences of doing things differently, doing things elsewhere, making do – with what you have, with others, with moderation, with care – abound in art and design schools architecture, universities, engineering and management schools. The research done at the schools testifies to attempts to regenerate living environments through creation.
Curators
Sophie Pène and Rodolphe Dogniaux
The exhibition is accompanied by a symposium on 27 and 28 May 2025.
It will examine the meaning of "making" in design, its conditions and its forms in living environments undergoing transformation, focusing on several aspects:
- The ethics of making: making differently, what conditions to allow ourselves?
- Agency in creation; performative actions, manifest actions.
- Arts and industries: what the arts and design do to industries, what the new factories are doing to the arts and design.
- Theoretical infrastructure: the contribution of historical knowledge and philosophical thinking to our reflection on technical making and on transformative agency.
Conference academic committee
Armand Behard (ENSCI, Paris),
Gwenaëlle Bertrand (UJM, Saint-Étienne),
Nicolas Bourriaud (Commissaire d’exposition, auteur, Les Radicants),
Claire Brunet (ENS, Paris-Saclay),
Indiana Collet Barquero (Énsad, Limoges),
Rodolphe Dogniaux
(Ésad Saint-Étienne),
Davide Fornari (ECAL, Lausanne), Sylvia Fredriksson (Ésad Orléans),
Sylvain Gouraud (ÉsadHar, Le Havre),
Émilie Perotto (Ésad Saint-Étienne),
Océane Ragoucy
(ENSA, Paris-Malaquais),
Noémie Sauve (Ésad TALM, Le Mans),
Emmanuel Tibloux (ENSAD, Paris),
Antonella Tufano (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1),
Pierre Lévy (CNAM, Paris),
Géraldine Longueville (ÉESI, Poitiers).
Sophie Pène
Emeritus professor of information and communication sciences at the University
of Paris Cité, Sophie Pène specialises in the analysis of digital practices and studies collective forms of innovation. With Benjamin Graindorge she curated the Le Monde sinon rien exhibition at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne 2022.
Rodolphe Dogniaux
A designer trained at ENSCI
– Les Ateliers and ENSAAMA Olivier de Serres, Rodolphe Dogniaux has been developing his work as a designer-researcher since 2013. He is the creator of the Design Matin blog. At Ésad Saint-Étienne, he ran
the postgraduate Design and Research course, is a member of the Object Lab, and teaches on and coordinates the Object Design masters’ course.
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