Credits: Patrick Imbert/Mathieu Pernot/Collège de France
Le Point de départ is a work created with a group of migrants as part of a writing workshop run in collaboration with the association Français Langue d'Accueil. Mathieu Pernot gave the group large drawing sheets on which to write a text introducing themselves in their native language. Participants accompanied their text with a drawing illustrating the map of the regions and countries from which they come (Nepal, Chechnya, Tibet, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Georgia and Armenia). They also talk about the difficulties of learning a new language and arriving in an unfamiliar country. These multilingual, colorful, hand-drawn texts can be seen as the beginnings of a narrative that gradually takes shape with the artist. Le Point de départ is the first presentation of Mathieu Pernot's work during his artist residency at the Collège de France.
The exhibition can be viewed freely when the rooms are open for lectures
About Mathieu Pernot
Mathieu Pernot's work is in the tradition of political art informed by history and sociology. Pernot's series are analytical and successive points of view on the major political and social issues of identity and memory, alienation and progress. During the 2000s, he developed a number of projects on the subjects of confinement, urbanism and migration. His work with Philippe Artières on the archives of the Bon Sauveur psychiatric hospital won the Nadar prize in 2013. He was awarded the Prix Niépce in 2014, the same year that the Jeu de Paume devoted an exhibition to him, La traversée, retracing twenty years of photography. In 2017, Mathieu Pernot presented an exhibition at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles, The Gorgan which retraced the individual destinies of members of a Roma family, whom the artist had met twenty years earlier and with whom he had forged close ties.
By welcoming this artist for the 2017-2018 year, the Collège de France is reaffirming its twofold commitment: to participate in reflection on the major issues shaking contemporary societies, and to open up to artists who, alongside scientists and professors, produce knowledge that questions worlds and helps us to understand them, in all their plurality.
