*March 2022

The leatherwork section at the Lycée des Huisselets in Montbéliard has been awarded the Excellence Métiers d’Art label by the Académie de Besançon and the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté Department of Cultural Affairs. The aim of this label is to distinguish high-quality training in the field of arts and crafts. As such, an artist residency is being funded by these institutions and organised for the first year in partnership with the 19, Crac.


The artist Chloé Serre (born in Saint Étienne in 1986 and living in Paris) has been invited to share her artistic practice with students and teachers at the lycée during the month of March 2022, by taking up residence inside of the leather goods workshops. The artist’s sculpture and performance work revolve around the ritual elements inherent in social interaction. Together they will exchange technical know-how and artistic ideas in order to produce the Duplicata project, which will question the status of the bag as an object with a sign effect, in other words as an economic, social and/or professional marker.


“In a world of pomp and circumstance where digital technology accentuates the staging of the self-image, Roland Gori talks about ordinary imposture: the masquerade of signifiers without meaning1. Far from being a moral judgement, he defines this notion of imposture as a strategy for a society that gives more and more credit to performance, opinion and efficiency. The impostor thus becomes the mirror of a society and its current values. He is the one who is perfectly suited to the role he has been assigned. Developing a high-flying ability to adapt, he loses himself in a social order. He follows a script of actions, gestures and rituals, performing the rhetorical act that will give him a certain legitimacy.
With the Duplicata project the bag, as an accessory in our daily lives, becomes a sculpture. Once deployed, these sculptural objects intended to be worn (other than for their intended purpose) will become hyperboles of our ‘habitus’, as if we were becoming the very linings of our appearances.”

Chloé Serre
1-Roland Gori, La fabrique des imposteurs, Babel, France, 2015, p.39.


Chloé Serre will be taking part in the exhibition Trois petits tours et puis s’en vont from September 2022 at 19, Crac.

artist’s website