PLAYGROUND

DRAWING • SHARING • EXPERIMENTING

INTRODUCTION

For several years, I have been developing workshops based on a drawing framework I devised during my adolescence. Initially conceived as a form of personal writing, it gradually evolved into a space for collective creation and a tool for exploring the ways we perceive, organise, and represent the world.

Through these experiences, I am interested in how a shared framework can reveal a multitude of ways of thinking and creating.

01. DRAWING BY FRAGMENT

From a personal visual language to a collective creative process.

I began drawing this way when I arrived in France at the age of twelve. Not yet speaking French, drawing became a form of expression for me, somewhere between writing and image-making.

On A4 sheets of paper, I arrange small squares, approximately 2.5 cm on each side, in slightly staggered columns. I start at the top left, work my way down to the bottom of the page, then return to the top of the next column.

Each square contains an image, a sign, a word, a memory, or an invention. Together, they form a kind of journal in which different temporalities and realities can coexist. What initially began as a way of organising my thoughts gradually evolved into a creative process that I wanted to share with others.

02. THE SMALL FORMAT

A method for thinking and creating.

The small size of each square reduces the stakes of every individual intervention, allowing for multiple attempts. Each fragment represents a moment of thought while contributing to a larger structure. One image becomes the starting point for another; a motif reappears, transforms, or disappears. The drawing gradually takes shape, without its final form necessarily being known in advance. Over the years, this practice has evolved into a working method that allows me to collect ideas, trace their transformations, and establish connections between elements that were initially scattered.

03. A FIRST EXPERIENCE IN A HOSPITAL SETTING

One framework, different behaviour.

I first introduced this creative framework in a psychiatric day hospital in Brittany, inviting patients, nurses, and doctors to draw together. Everyone was given the same sheet of paper and the same tools, yet each person approached drawing differently. Some spontaneously filled the squares, while others crossed their boundaries, counted, repeated signs, or depicted familiar figures.

This experience profoundly transformed the way I viewed my own work. I discovered that a framework initially designed to organise my thoughts could also become a means of observing different ways of responding to an instruction, engaging with a space, and approaching a creative situation.

A question then emerged: how can the same framework give rise to such different graphic compositions?

04. OBSERVING WHAT PERSISTS

Workshops in a secondary school and exploration of different techniques.

I then developed a series of workshops over three months with students at a secondary school in the Île-de-France region, aged around twelve or thirteen, the same age at which I had begun this practice myself. By introducing drawing, painting, and collage in succession, I sought to observe how changes in technique affected the way they organised forms. Certain tendencies seemed to persist despite these changes: repetition, grouping, symmetry, dispersion, or particular ways of occupying the page. These observations led me to question the existence of graphic habits and how they develop and transform through our experiences.

Three examples of organisation within the grid:

Left: Organisation in columns

Centre: Abstract drawings forming a figure

Right: Symmetrical organisation

05. COMPARING THE WORKS

A shared framework, different approaches.

Some participants organise motifs in columns, while others repeat the same sign, combine words and images, or develop compositions that extend across several squares. Some follow the grid, while others reinterpret or ignore it.

These differences reveal a multitude of ways of establishing relationships between elements: repeating, grouping, separating, creating hierarchies, connecting, or leaving spaces between them.

By observing these works, I seek to understand how we develop our individual ways of organising forms and, more broadly, of perceiving the world.

Two drawings created by two people who seemingly have nothing in common, yet organise their compositions in space in the same way.

06. FROM INDIVIDUAL DRAWING TO COLLECTIVE CREATION

Drawing as the starting point for a shared project.

During a workshop with a group of cognitive science researchers, I invited participants to lay their drawings on the floor and arrange them according to formal similarities: repetition, writing, colour, or spatial organisation.

This collective sorting process revealed unexpected connections between the drawings. I then invited each participant to stand beside their own drawing, forming new working groups. Based on these groupings, the participants developed a shared project, each extending an approach already present in their own drawing. I later repeated this experiment with art school students. It led me to consider drawing not only as an individual form of expression, but also as a means of generating new forms of collaboration.

07. THE EPISTEMIC DOUBLE

Towards a genealogy of perception.

I am currently developing an experimental project that extends these workshops by combining drawing with the recording of certain physiological data.

Using a tablet, a stylus, and an electrodermal activity sensor, the system would make it possible to record the progression of gestures, pauses, repetitions, and certain physiological variations during the drawing process. From this data, a second image would be generated, which I call the “epistemic double”. The recorded variations would be translated into colours according to a predefined system, revealing an alternative representation of the creative process.

The aim is to explore the relationships between the forms produced, the gestures that give rise to them, and the individual’s lived experience.

This research is part of a broader inquiry that I call a genealogy of perception: how are our ways of seeing, selecting, and organising forms shaped by our experiences?

The epistemic double also raises a question about memory and the persistence of traces: what can we preserve of a lived moment, and what escapes us when an experience becomes a representation?

Example of a drawing and its epistemic double.

Left: Empty grid

Centre: Drawing created by a participant

Right: Drawing coloured according to variations in physiological activity recorded while each square was being completed.