As part of the first part of the two-part conference “Infrastructures and Forms of Community in Informal Art Spaces in a Global Context” convened by the Connecting – Excluding. Cultural Practices Beyond Global Networking research training group at the University of Cologne and the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect at the LMU Munich, Mona Schieren will present a paper on 4 November entitled:

On the Edge of Institution. Centre Saint Charles at Paris

14.00-15.00, Universität zu Köln, Repräsentationssaal, Klosterstr. 79b, 50931 Cologne

Founded in 1969 in the immediate aftermath of May '68, the Centre Saint-Charles at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne emerged as an experimental site within — yet structurally at odds with — the French university system. Conceived as a laboratory for radical pedagogy, it deliberately positioned itself at the edge of institutional legitimacy, testing how far an art school could dismantle hierarchical teaching models while remaining tethered to state infrastructure. Central to this experiment was the invitation of international, and notably Latin American, artist-teachers — among them Lygia Clark and Lea Lublin — whose practices of embodied, participatory and relational art profoundly reshaped the school's pedagogical language. This talk examines Centre Saint-Charles as a case of instituting practice: an informal, para-institutional space that used the resources of a national university to host artistic knowledges otherwise excluded from it. I ask to what extent this constellation produced genuinely decolonial effects — displacing Eurocentric hierarchies of teaching and authorship — or whether it remained bound by the very institutional frameworks it sought to exceed and reproduced exotisms. Drawing on archival material and interviews of its invited teachers, the paper situates Centre Saint-Charles within a global history of art schools operating at the friction point between informal community-building and institutional consolidation.