"Faculties and higher education institutions will provide online courses
.
"
Emmanuel Macron's announcement on October 28 did not surprise anyone.
With the reconfinement, universities and grandes écoles have resumed broadcasting power points and lectures on platforms.
For other formations, the case turned into a puzzle.
At the National School of Fine Arts in Paris (ENSBA), as in other artistic schools, it had been difficult to go online during the first confinement.
The second is not simpler.
Quite the contrary.
Read also: When the Fine Arts open the debate
And for good reason, there is little theoretical teaching at the Fine Arts.
The strength of the school is based on artistic workshops, in which a teacher, workshop manager, accompanies about fifteen students.
“These are workplaces where you settle in for the year
,” explains second year student Anabel.
We have room, we can make the space dirty and it's rare to be able to occupy a place like that!
Then we are very free, we have few lessons, so what is important is the advice we will find over time, by getting to know people ”.
The student adds, disappointed:
"Painting cannot be learned on Zoom."
"Not a change, Hiroshima"
As in so many other sectors, it is the loss of social ties that handicaps students the most.
“More than an emulation, the workshop is a real jacuzzi.
They marinate with each other for several years.
Promiscuity and conviviality are decisive in the training of Fine Arts ”
, explains Olivier Blanckart, workshop manager.
When he mentions these two confinements, the sculptor and photographer is quite serious:
“It's not a change, it's Hiroshima.
I was able to accompany some students, others did not respond.
I even went to see one in the depths of the Pyrenees, at her parents' house, to convince her to continue.
I had a graphics tablet delivered to him by Fedex. ”
The inequalities between those who could continue to create, have space, and students who had to take a food job or were stuck in their Parisian studio are colossal.
Tom, a fifth-year student, went through the first apartment lockdown.
“
It was complicated morally, socially.
There is a very fine line between work and personal life in art studies.
So it's hard for all students, but for us confinement attacks the center of our sociability,
he admits
.
The workshop represents everything: opportunities to present your work, have professional and human contacts ... "
A study conducted among 6,000 visual artists affiliated and subject to the Maison des Artistes by the Ministry of Culture and Jérémy Sinigaglia, lecturer in political science at the University of Strasbourg, shows precisely the weight of its social inequalities in art schools.
It also insists on the essential role of these specialized schools in the future careers of plastic surgeons.
It is there, within these establishments, that links with the art world are created, that networks are forged.
Avoid school closure
On returning from the first confinement at the Beaux-Arts, everyone respected the distance, the masks.
Everyone knew that if there was a cluster, the school would close.
"The confinement has just increased their desire and their will to be here tenfold
,
"
rejoices Olivier Blanckart.
But nothing helps, the exponential increase in contamination has got the better of everyone's desires.
At the microphone of France Inter, on the first morning of the reconfinement, Joann Sfar was also thinking of his first year students:
"The poor, they are great and at the same time they draw like potatoes, because they arrive, you have to learn.
(...) When we are all together there is a sensuality, when we are going to show our drawings.
Knowing that it's going to happen behind a screen ... It's not my sensuality. ”
Some try to turn the constraint into an opportunity.
To find in this forced retreat a new possibility of expression, even of experimentation.
Bénédicte, a second year student, was able to leave Paris:
“I'm pretty positive.
We do it with the means at hand, it allows us to see things differently ”
.
An optimism to which Olivier Blanckart accepts:
“In confinement, they are already in the artist's conditions, to produce art.
It is also a very nice lesson, they discover what it is to work alone, without the eyes of others. ”
For this second confinement, the Prime Minister had however announced some exemptions for practical work in universities.
The Fine Arts administration has obtained authorization to have each student come to school at least two days a week, in groups of up to four students, in order to be able to practice in a workshop.
For most students, however, the end of this year 2020 is experienced as a test.
"
I'll just try to keep working
," Tom resigns.
But it's the depression. ”
Cinema, theater, music ... The student journalists of
IPJ, the Practical Institute of Journalism of the University of Paris Dauphine
, offer their perspective on cultural news.
Dauphine IPJ
