Calypso Debrot, visual artist and filmmaker born in 1990, lives and works in Navarrenx. A graduate of Fine Arts from Montpellier, she is a member of the Jeune Cinéma cooperative, which promotes experimental practices in image and film. For three days during the first week of All Saints’ Day vacation, she and photographer Maya Paulès supervised the creation of stop-motion mini-films by children and adolescents at the Image/Imatge art center. Little ones on vacation happily rubbed shoulders with young people from the Rural Family Home (MFR) in Mont, the Francis Jammes Medical-Educational Institute (IME) in Orthez, and the Brassalay Social Children’s Home (MECS) by Biron. That’s around sixty participants in total, aged 6 to 18 years old.
Ghostly presences
“In the morning, it’s a plastic workshop: they produce drawing, painting, cutting, etc. And in the afternoon, they animate, also work on sound and sound effects. Then Calypso puts it all together,” explains Emma Bourras Carrère, responsible for the center’s audiences and communications. Young people are in fact invited to take ownership of all the creative stages, from the invention of the story and the characters to the creation of images, including the manufacturing of decorative elements. “Today they started with stories about ghostly presences,” smiles the manager. “Calypso initiates a theme, and lets the children say things about it,” adds director Cécile Archambeaud. It colors the story, which is then co-constructed. »
The artist Calypso Debrot, from Navarrenx, led a workshop with children and adolescents around stop motion mini-films.
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The artist confirms: “I offer them manufacturing processes, mediums, tools, then I let them do it. Discussion and practice take place. Apart from donating equipment, I don’t do anything else.” On the large communal table set up in the heart of the art gallery, pencils, paper, and scissors are in the starting blocks. Around, girls and boys throw up clues of intrigue, places, twists and turns. The process is started.
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Everyone was invited to participate in creating the story, inventing the characters, creating decorative elements, etc.
To put everything together, Calypso and Maya benefited from the support of four student friends from the Beaux-Arts d’Annecy united within the La Mauvaise Address collective: Isaulde Ardouin Dumazet, Charlotte De Moliner, Elsa Charriez and Yani.
Screening session
Activist ecologist, Calypso Debrot aspires to share knowledge, and sees these workshops as “a utopian incursion into society”: “There is a divide between children’s art – not at all valued, which is seen as a leisure activity, a hobby, something uninteresting – and the art of certain adults which benefits from more legitimacy, she regrets. Through the workshops, I discover the world of children, what is going on in their heads and it is extremely powerful. I think we have a lot to learn from that.”
Saturday afternoon, a screening session allowed us to discover the stop motion mini-films, the fruit of the collective work. Smiles, applause: the magic of the collective has worked.
Luce Garderes
This Saturday, a screening session allowed us to discover the stop motion mini-films, the fruit of collective work.
