Nuit Blanche at Vitry-sur-Seine

During Nuit Blanche 2025 in Vitry-sur-Seine, the itinerant projection workshop transformed a multidisciplinary day into a collective and improvised artistic experience.

A day of artistic convergences

Nuit Blanche, a major cultural event organized in Paris, Greater Paris and many other cities since 2002, was placed in 2025 under the sign of cinema. The artistic direction had been entrusted to filmmaker Valérie Donzelli. One of the main principles of Nuit Blanche is also multidisciplinarity and the openness of cultural proposals.

The city of Vitry-sur-Seine chose to make a multidisciplinary and participatory proposal to link cinema with other arts, including the itinerant projection medium that I facilitated there. During Saturday June 7^th, the 3 Cinés Robespierre cinema offered film screenings, notably Michel Gondry’s latest animated film, Maya give me a title, and animation film-making workshops in his style led by Delphine Potier, as well as playful testimonies via the innovative Moviematon booth. And in parallel, the Jean Collet art gallery offered performances and the opening of an exhibition by students from the preparatory class for art schools in Vitry-sur-Seine, as well as an exhibition and performance by Thomas Lemire, currently exhibition curator of this gallery.

The day ended with an itinerant projections workshop that I facilitated to, based on everything that had happened, collectively imagine and implement video projections in public space, thanks to the pico-projector. Multidisciplinarity is always something more complicated to implement than monodisciplinarity because each discipline, each art form has its temporality, its logic, its form of spirit. Coming together is more difficult, but it’s also always very enriching.

Aesthetics of relation

To link these different proposals, I was present in the afternoon and filmed moments, performances and pieces from the exhibitions in the form of short sequence shots. The theme of Thomas Lemire’s exhibition was very strong, it was about washerwomen, as the gallery location is the site of a former washhouse, and about the violence on bodies of past and contemporary hygienism.

I let myself be immersed by all the encounters with people, with the works. I had with me several cameras, equipment for several potential creative devices, but in the afternoon, it was I who filmed with people after asking for their consent. And this ended with the filming of Thomas Lemire’s performance on the violence of hygienism, itself integrating film excerpts that dialogued with the great “cleaning” he was performing on his own body.

A small group formed after the performance, and while drinking champagne, fruit juice and enjoying canapés, we watched together all the videos that had been created that same afternoon: the animated films, the videos in the Moviematon, elements from the exhibitions and performances. Then we chose together what we would upload into the two pico-projectors I had brought, to then go together to play at transforming the space through projected images.

Improvisation as creative method

In June, it only gets dark outside from 10:15 PM and moreover the weather forecast announced rain at that time, which unfortunately did happen. So, we finally chose to do this itinerant projection in the large exhibition space of the Jean Collet gallery! This is where the small motivated group, passing the projectors from hand to hand, playing with the images, mixing images with each other, mixing the sequences we had chosen, the performances with the exhibited works, playing with projections on the body, with all the resonances this could evoke, gathering in this moment of shared creation where creation, diffusion, performance, experience of spectators who become artists of their own living exhibition of these images were mixed. Some participants had attended the performances and were transforming them in this joyful and creative palimpsest.

We also all took photos of this moment of collective creation, which we deposited in a permanent shared digital space, which you can find below, where the films we projected are also deposited. This is what photography and digital tools allow us to do today: produce images to broadcast them very quickly, to reappropriate our gaze and share it with others, and also preserve traces, this tooled memory that Bernard Stiegler spoke of, which contributes to giving even more value to what we experienced and shared.

The lightweight device of the pico-projector allowed us to adapt, to reinvent on the spot, according to what had happened during the day, as well as the weather, to be able, thanks to the agility possible with these new technologies, to invent the artistic proposal together.

For example, the images projected on the ground that we run after, I had never done that, I had never seen it, it was invented that evening. The images also used as lighting, as texture, I had never seen that either. The images superimposed on other works, to create new forms, this affirmed to me the great interest of this type of approach. Because my habit is rather to project on walls, on surfaces, on textures, and to relate the images to the urban context that surrounds them. There, we were really in the projection of images as a creative gesture. The two projectors too, whose images could dialogue together, complement each other, overlap, this I discovered, the participants, children and adults, invented it that evening, in this intuition, this improvisation, these gestures that are like so many seeds sown in the spirit of the participants and in mine.

Preparing the possible

So I too was extremely nourished, I learned a lot from this experience.

I had with me, in terms of technical equipment, a certain variety, because I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, and I was ready to do various things. I also had a system to create animated films, I had microphones to record sound, cameras, the pico-projector, a larger video projector too, etc.

I always have a little more equipment than what is planned to do, precisely in order to put myself in a position to be able to adapt the project to what happens, to be able to give all the room for contribution to participants and that, when they express their desires, I am as much as possible able to say “yes”. Myself, I had not planned that, during that day, I would make several short films in sequence shots, which were part of the films projected in the evening.

Art as democratic experience

This brings me back deeply to the subject: what is art? What is an artist?

I believe that we are all artists, art brut shows this well, and that art, as John Dewey said in 1934, is the artistic experience, lived alone or together. And my place, as an artist, at that moment, was to put myself in a capacity for openness, with my skills of course, so that something could be created collectively, in the connections, during that day. I also met important people, I believe, with whom we exchanged contact information.

The images that illustrate this article are the trace of this ephemeral experience lived, also tell the story of the importance, it seems to me, of this aesthetics of relation, of relation as an art. And to make a wink that really signifies the multidisciplinary and open dimension of the project, if we look at the communication documents about this evening, they all say different things to present the proposal, even the schedules are different. I find it actually very beautiful, very much in the image of this artistic buzz that crystallized in this moment of encounter and projection, which was the initial project, an itinerant projection, indoors rather than outdoors, but in a way that was the meeting between the imaginations of all the people present, in democracy.

This artistic adventure was made possible by the active and flexible support of Natacha Juniot, director of the 3 Cinés Robespierre cinema, and Thomas Lemire, curator, Armelle Saulin, public relations officer and Romain Métivier, manager and collection manager, at the galerie municipale Jean-Collet.