Initiales/La Revue — Maria Montessori — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Monday, November 20, 2017 7 PM → 9 PM

Directed by Claire Moulène and Emmanuel Tibloux

Participants:

 —  Emmanuel Tibloux, editor-in-chief and publication director;
 —  Vincent Romagny, curator, art critic and publisher, co-editor-in-chief for the issue;
 —  Rozenn Canevet, historian and art critic;
 —  Camila Oliveira Fairclough, artist;
 —  Maxime Delavet and Laurent Peteuil, graphic designers.

And a performance by Anna Holveck.

The publication of the tenth issue of Initiales magazine is an opportunity to draw attention to a one-of-a-kind publication. In only five years, it has succeeded in establishing itself as one of the best art magazines in France.

Initiales is based on a simple concept: in each issue, artists, critics, thinkers and other personalities of today take a new look at one figure (whose initials give the issue its title), by highlighting the contemporary aspects we see in his or her work.

Published by the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Lyon, and co-produced with the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Initiales also wagers that today, an art school is one of the places most likely to produce and organize new forms of thought liable to inspire discussion and broaden the scope of art and thought. Both its contents and graphics are designed by and in the school, and it includes work by many outside contributors. It is thus a school magazine, but precisely insofar as the school is a place of transit, encounters and collaboration with many other actors from outside the institution. The layout is reinvented for each issue, based on a highly recognizable, easily adaptable graphic design that offers a unique fusion between elegance and experimentation, historical consciousness and prospective research.

After having explored figures who have been either forgotten or unfairly undervalued, like the founder of the Fluxus avant-garde movement George Maciunas, and television pioneer Jean-Christophe Averty, and having confronted giants like Marguerite Duras and Pierre Paolo Pasolini, for this birthday issue, Initiales has chosen to pay tribute to a major figure of this history of education: Maria Montessori.

Benefiting from resurgent interest in the context of new questions being raised about our educational system, as evinced by the success of Céline Alvarez’s book Les lois naturelles de l’enfant, or the desire, recently expressed by Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer “to encourage the Montessori spirit”, the Italian educator provides a broader opportunity to explore the question of the relationship between art and education. It is a fundamental question for an art school, but it would be beneficial if it further nourished our educational model.