Creating, traveling, drawing, and building: such is the DNA of the exuberant architect and designer Marcelo Joulia. Driven from his home country of Argentina by the 1976 military coup, this personal trauma gave him the strength to be a great builder. For thirty years, his agency Naço —‘intuition’ in the Guarani language—has been the laboratory of a global and inventive architecture, aiming to decompartmentalise genres and trades, and mixing knowledge, arts, and professional backgrounds together. Belonging to no specific school, and fiercely attached to his independence and freedom, he has imagined a unique creative space in which expertise and rigour both flourish within the domains of luxury, urban mobility, and major architecture. As an insatiable adventurer, he is able to take an interest in anything —large-scale buildings, design, furniture, bicycles, boats— while not denying himself anything. His passion revolves around teamwork and bringing talents together to conceive of new worlds. As an epicurean, a generous person passionate about art and gastronomy, Marcelo Joulia creates places in his image: unique, welcoming, and always dynamic.

This book showcases the vision of a man and an agency that has surrounded itself with the best and strived to bring to life a demanding and iconoclastic architecture, and carry it forth into the future.

Co-Creation is a multifaceted publication that is part of a research initiative into co-creation and socially engaged art practices. Begun in 2013, this long-term initiative has been the work of Céline Poulin (the director of CAC Brétigny) and Marie Preston (artist and teacher-researcher at Université Paris 8), along with Stéphanie Airaud (the director of public outreach and cultural initiatives at MAC VAL). The publication took shape in part around a three-day symposium at MAC VAL and CAC Brétigny, a master’s seminar in Contemporary Art Media Design of Université Paris 8 at Villa Vassilieff, and finally an exhibition at CAC Brétigny.
A new theoretical advance and not simply the proceedings of a symposium, Co-Creation has allowed us to bring together and get out to the public, in France and abroad, the contributions this research project has inspired. No comparable reference work existed in France before the present publication. This book allows us to pursue a dialogue with all those who are contributing internationally to such reflections. It records the development of collective work that is helping to connect French and international universities, art centres, museums, art schools, etc. Different questions raised by co-creation practices and dealt with in earlier iterations are returned to or are treated in greater depth as new ones emerge. What, for example, is the heritage of popular education in co-creation practices? Who is speaking when more than one is in fact speaking? What is at stake in terms of power and statuses in a group that is working together? What kind of private connections and what kind of relationship to daily reality does that involve? What interactions exist between alternative educational methods and co-creation practices? What methodologies of evaluation, aesthetic or not, are possible?
Made up of theoretical and/or personal texts by philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, artists, and art historians, along with several interviews, this edition is organised around five essential cross-disciplinary themes, namely, conversation, the collective, education, vulnerability, and evaluation.

Editors: Céline Poulin & Marie Preston with the participation of Stéphanie Airaud
Texts: Stéphanie Airaud, Andrea Ancira, Marnie Badham, Virginie Bobin, Caroline Darroux, François Deck, Marie Fraser, Véronique Goudinoux, Núria Güell, Adelita Husni-Bey, Florence Jou, Grant H. Kester, Camille Louis, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Maude Mandart, Christian Maurel, Céline Poulin, Marie Preston, Katia Schneller, Myriam Suchet, Mathilde Villeneuve.

This book traces Jennifer Caubet’s work during her residency at the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts plastiques (Cirva), from 2017 to 2019. Immersed in Cirva’s studio as well as in her own, Jennifer Caubet was able to experience the many variations of the glass material through dialogue with the art center’s team of glass technicians. The sculptural projects she has developed at Cirva question various recurring notions in her work as an artist: how sculpture negotiates the relations to spaces and territories using scale measurements and the interaction with the human body; how gesture and movement determine shape; and where the boundaries between sculpture and landscape lie. Designed as a journey through the gestation stages of her work, the notebooks function as a score, offering, in all transparency, a reading of her preparatory drawings, annotations, studio gestures, and up until her finished works.

Texts: Isabelle Reiher, Lise Guéhenneux, Fabien Faure, Jennifer Caubet