They are three to stroll with a certain step in the picturesque streets of the Butte-aux-Cailles, this Saturday morning in October. In the heart of this bucolic district of the 13th arrondissement of Paris, between Place d'Italie and Parc Montsouris, residents drop their shutters open onto colorful alleys. Under their unperturbed eyes, and in front of those of the waiters who began to deploy chairs on the terraces, the trio swept with a shrewd glance the row of the rue des Cinq-Diamants on one side and the place of the Commune-de-Paris on the other. They approach a thin section of wall, wedged between two windows. A handful of purple arums and cherry butterflies escape from a cardboard case, followed by the effigy of a boy, Josephine Baker.
A novelty accompanies the muse of the Roaring Twenties and the works, which jostle in this high place of urban art.
It is a small plasticized square in bright colors, stuck next to the work, whose cubic hieroglyphs are now familiar to holders of a health pass: a QR code.
The portal to cultural mediation at your fingertips.
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The same words are repeated, like a mantra, at the bottom of the constellation of codes that have hatched since October 23 at Butte-aux-Cailles.
Like an invitation, too.
"Scan Some Art",
let's scan some art.
Behind this call and these codes, there is Morgane, the youngest of the three figures to scour the neighborhood that morning.
Checked the same morning, the system she imagined works wonderfully: with the agreement of the designers, each QR code scanned using a smartphone sends the pedestrian Internet user to the Instagram page of her association, Scan Some Art, dedicated to the work of street art highlighted.
The collage then regains its identity and its artist.
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Conceived by Morgane for her thesis at the IESA, the Institute of Graduate Arts, this idea of mediation 2.0 has gradually gained ground.
This Saturday, it materialized in a pickaxe of coded and colored cards piled up in his Christie's bag.
Then from the bag to the walls, made some last minute adjustments.
But for this street baptism of her QR codes, practical considerations torment her.
Are its digital labels a reasonable size?
How high to stick them?
And at what distance from the works?
Promote street heritage
Her first copy of the morning, set near a feminist collage of Wild Wonder Woman, features a size similar to the nude figure with a pink mane created by the artist. Further on, a work by Louyz, a cheerful apricot-colored lizard absorbed in conversation with the neighboring collage of a woman's head, is perched at a good height. A sizeable challenge for the founder of Scan Some Art, who had to climb onto the extreme tip of her sneakers, arm outstretched, to affix the QR code of the work. He had to stick it high enough to be close to the reptile, while remaining within reach of smartphones. Beside, Anne, Morgane's mother is having fun with her daughter's pirouettes.
"I managed to make a child even smaller than me, it's amazing
, s'she exclaims proudly.
She is the little woman with the QR codes ”.
Urban art collages coexist at the Butte-aux-Cailles with memories of the Paris Commune.
Simon cherner
Pixel art owls, tributes to the
"Municipality of Paname"
, multicolored faces punctuated with various tags as well as processions of monsters as toothed as they are variegated ... The accumulation of street art in the alleys of the hill can make you dizzy and lose your senses. curious in silent contemplation.
Even discourage them, no cartel, no artist's name standing out from this enigmatic abundance.
Apart from now, a few QR codes.
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Rather than the stars Miss Tic and Invader, Scan Some Art has chosen, in its first selection of urban mediation, to highlight more confidential street art figures, including Wekup, Teuthis, Esboner and The End of Animals.
"I made a selection among the artists who stood out the most at the Butte-aux-Cailles, those whose new collages I regularly saw and whose universes I liked, while being a little less known"
, explains Morgane, the informal commissioner of this new development.
Beauty of the ephemeral
After some early morning trial and error, the six-handed collage of Joséphine Baker and her mediation vector comes to an end without a hitch.
Morgane and her mother are assisted by the urban artist Demoiselle MM, who spins a series of enchanting portraits, all in poetry and color, of fictional and historical women.
"It is superb !"
, trumpets the artist who, with the founder of Scan Some Art, contemplates with a smile the combined effect of the work and its code.
Neither of them, however, have any illusions about the ephemeral nature of this ensemble, between the street and the Web.
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Like the artists, the
“little woman with QR codes”
does not expect to last long on the walls of the neighborhood.
"I don't live far away, I could go by and see if everything is still there
," Morgane underlines in a pragmatic tone.
Whether it's been tagged or not, that's the game; if there are other things on it, it is the game; if he was taken away, so is the game. After all, it's made to be fleeting. ”
You don't have to look very far to find traces of this eternal palimpsest formed by the improvised picture rails of the Butte-aux-Cailles: partly inspired by the upcoming pantheonization of Joséphine Baker, the collage is thus shrouded in a broad and dark stain, enamelled with microfragments of paper.
"The town hall has just taken off everything that was there"
, kindly warns the glueers an old resident of the building.
Urban art nonetheless flourishes on the complicit walls of the district.
And this, despite the deafening approach of two police officers on motorcycles.
Demoiselle MM and Morgane in full collage of the portrait of the American astronomer Véra Rubin.
Scan Some Art
The patrol passes with regal indifference in front of the small group of splicers. Demoiselle MM is not moved by it, although she is already staring at the wall that will host her next collage, a tribute all in stars, equations and Jupiterian earrings to the American astronomer Véra Rubin (1928-2016) .
"I'm going to stick it there, and then if we take it off, we take it off,"
she blurted out with cheerful determination. And a hint of habit. La Butte-aux-Cailles is a popular island for graffiti artists and visual artists, in an environment where you have to know how to gauge local tolerance thresholds. A welcoming environment, in a context where
street art
, popular in essence, can sometimes be perceived as a
“mess”,
as underlined by the national study on urban art entrusted to Jean Faucheur - the co-founder of the Ripoulin Brothers and French pioneer of the genre -, handed over to the Ministry of Culture in 2019.
“I find that it does not distort the place
, pleads Miss MM.
It's not like the black tags made over the works which are not pretty ”
.
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The inhabitants of the district seem to put up with the swarms of colors and shapes that cap the corner of the streets and the linear of the shops of the hill.
"It has already happened to some artists that residents ask to have collages on their building,"
says Morgane. QR codes are aimed at regulars from the neighborhood as well as strollers from afar. Illustration of this shared appetite, small gatherings of curious people form around the three women and their collages.
Demoiselle MM consolidates her portrait of Vera Rubin with a rag, Morgane finishes affixing the associated QR code, while her mother presents in a few words to passers-by the principle of Scan Some Art. A lady in the green beret, as old as she is mischievous, walks in amazement in front of Josephine Baker, exclaims - all delighted - to recognize the subject and takes a picture. Shortly after, a street art guide and her group of foreign tourists took the opportunity to admire the finishes of these new works in the neighborhood. Finally, a cheerful little girl bursts into the midst of the grown-ups and Morgana.
"It's nice!",
she launches, extending her adjective on a dumbfounded note.
She does not know that the work she has just incensed is signed Demoiselle MM.
Her grandparents, smartphone in hand, might tell her.