Virginie Gannac

Biography

Virginie Gannac teaches design and visual arts at the prestigious École Boulle in Paris. With a doctorate in art from the University of Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and an alumnus of the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et des métiers d’art (ENS AAMA), she began her career at the École supérieur d’art et de mode Duperré, before training future design teachers at the University of Cergy-Pontoise. Her work focuses on the dialectics of heritage/modernity and art/science. She has developed a cross-disciplinary approach to the mediation of science, technology and heritage objects through scenography, styling, sculpture, video and craft. Her research focuses on the question of an object’s value over time: its durability, its transformation, its updating… or its disappearance. She has collaborated with the Institut Henri Poincaré, the Poems mathematics laboratory and astrophysicists on major exhibitions created by her students at the École Boulle.

Conference: Is digital technology orchestrating our lives?

Between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo painted the Creation of the World on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It shows God giving, through his finger, the breath of life to the first man, Adam. From this divine hand to that of the painter or art master, we will question the status of the artist as creator. Through creation, can the artist be likened to a demiurge capable of playing with time to the point of suspending it and creating timelessness? The artist moves between present, past and future in total conceptual freedom. So what does each creation reveal about the present, and what about when we receive it decades or hundreds of years later? Is restoration or interpretation a form of resurrection, an attempt at immortality? Based on a selection of major works from the history of the arts and productions by Métiers d’Art students at the École Boulle, we’ll see how the artist moves between heritage and modernity, propelling us through his hand into times that are both spaced and superimposed.