The Texan-French Alliance for the Arts contributed to the Banlieue is Beautiful festival held May 16-18 at the Palais de Tokyo (the biggest contemporary art museum in Europe) in Paris.
This event was developed by Monte Laster with the French-American Creative Exchange in partnerships with many organizations. Texan-French Alliance for the Arts presented one program/performance:
The World in the City / In My Shoes in collaboration with the UH Community Design Resource Center
As with the majority of the world’s major international cities, Paris is branding its future megacity status under the name of “le Grand Paris”. Through this process, which combines urban growth, the concentration of specific activities, economic dynamics and it’s demographic context, Banlieue is Beautiful strives to reveal the human and cultural richness which is specific to its suburbs. The vitality of it’s existing culture still remains greatly underestimated even though the suburbs contain the essential components of the cultural heritage and identity for the future metropolis. Individual initiatives contribute to a better understanding of the emerging “Grand Paris,” allowing it to be more anchored in reality. These initiatives enable ownership of the project by individuals; those who inhabit the city base it on a more profound understanding of the city. The process itself re-instates these territories in the future metropolis. Banlieue is Beautiful is a a social sculpture by Monte Laster which was organized by FACE (French American Creative Exchange). The project seeks to reveal cultural identity and question the role of art and culture in the socially complex context of urban renovation and the city’s search for its identity as a megacity. This project has enabled the numerous exchanges between artists, architects, rappers, students, children, inhabitants, and journalists and has allowed them to be implicated in different initiatives around a common subject: How to organize, present, and develop a creative and imaginative scenography that enables us to have an overall view of the suburbs of Paris. Banlieue is Beautiful derived from social and participative art forms, notions that are essential and at the heart of the project, which itself could not exist without this human, participative process.
