Agency

This residency is supported by the Seine-Saint-Denis Department.

Chloé Serre creates performances in which her sculptures are staged and activated by actors, dancers and musicians. With her works there is a porosity between theatre, dance, and more generally, with choreographic writing.

Influenced by her studies in social sciences and neuroscience, Chloé Serre uses this academic grounding to construct her artistic projects. She is interested in the common fabric, the mesh of conventions and the more or less tacit rules that give form to our social interactions, our gestures, postures and language.

The idea of play structures her work. It is one of the bases to think about her sculptural and graphic works. The play defines a framework, a scene to be entered, to reconstruct, study and reveal human behaviour.  

Agency, the game

During the six months of her residency in Noisy-le-Sec, Chloé Serre collaborated with various groups on the question of play, through three axes: language, body and decoration. She met with a CE1 class from école Rimbaud in Noisy-le-Sec, two year 7 classes from collège Jacques Prévert in Noisy-le-Sec, a year 9 class from collège International de l’Est-Parisien in Noisy-le-Grand, a group of teenagers from lycée Charles Péguy in Bobigny, and a group of adult gamers who use the Ludothèque du Londeau in Noisy-le-Sec. Each encounter results in a collection of stories from which she will draw inspiration for the video and performance Agency, created at the end of her residency.

In collaboration with graphic designer Tom Cazin, she created the board game Agency, whose goal is to create the best story as a team. This narrative game deals with the concept of storytelling, a narrative strategy used by companies as a promotional tool. “These stories of success and identities have become a form of communication in their own right, a pernicious form of advertising that seems like an entertaining, harmless story. However, in the background, the commodification affects and urges to consume are at play.  In other words, storytelling tells us about how we inhabit the world through the word of the market”, she explains.

With Agency, each team is assigned a sculpture/object that they must make part of a story. The players each write a moment of the story from cards and sculptures that they arrange on the board to create a narrative score. 

Agency, video and performance

Realised at the end of the residency, the video and performance Agency highlights the secret recipe to successful storytelling, fed by the stories produced during the games played by the school groups and by the inhabitants.

Screening of the film on Thursday 13 January, 2022 at 7pm at Médiathèque Roger-Gouhier.