Workshop with Raphaëlle de Groot

If we were to set off into the unknown tomorrow, what would you bring with you? What objects, concepts or values would you want to preserve for posterity? Artist Raphaëlle de Groot plans to explore these questions with participants in a collaborative workshop. Thus, the Modèles pour l’inconnu workshop invites participants to explore the possibilities of a multi-handed animated drawing. Everything takes place on a table whose surface represents the unknown. The game—for this is a playful experience—consists in setting in motion components cobbled together using a variety of materials, all captured by a camera suspended from the ceiling. This collective creative process thus generates surprising forms obtained from the elements created by the participants.

The notion of the unknown is central to Raphaëlle de Groot's creative process, as a kind of modus operandi. Not knowing the outcome in advance is a way for the artist to mobilize and learn along the way what gestures and thought are capable of producing when we let go.

The workshop is free, you can register here! Hurry, as places are limited.

Please note that the workshop will be held in French.

Raphaëlle de Groot lives and works between Montreal and Orsigna, Italy. She holds a master's degree in Visual Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2007). Her creative projects are always the fruit of an encounter with a living environment, a territory and people. She is interested in aspects of the human experience that are difficult to represent, such as sensations, the sense of belonging to the world and various states of attention, presence and engagement. Her approach is known for its open, collaborative methods of participation at the crossroads of art and social fabrics.

Raphaëlle has been presenting her work on the Canadian and international scene for the past twenty-five years, at numerous events including Nuit Blanche in Paris, Momenta | Biennale de l'image in Montreal and the Venice Biennale. She has received several awards, including the Sobey Award for the Arts in 2012. Communes mesures, her most recent solo exhibition, took place during the pandemic at the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides (2021). In autumn 2023, she will inaugurate at the MEM - Centre des mémoires montréalaises her first permanent public artwork, Les constellations de l'hippocampe, the fruit of a participatory and collaborative process unusual in an institutional context.