December 2024 - June 2025

As part of the « Excellence Métiers d’Art » label, the 19, Crac is renewing its partnership with the Huisselets professional highschool in Montbéliard, offering a residency of production within the school. This year, Andréa Spartà has been invited to work with students from the leather goods section. Together, they are working on a project to create a bag that looks ordinary, but is unlike any other.

” I think of this bag, which we recognize as a bag even though it has become almost shapeless. I’m thinking of the way this bag collects and contains. I’m thinking of the fact that it no longer contains to move matter, but to house it. I’m thinking about the way this bag makes a bouquet that gathers elements together. I’m thinking of how this object has become a still life.

With the students, I would like to imagine a bag that draws from this image. This bag would be designed to pick up, to collect material during a trip. I would like this bag to be used normally, like a bag, but that once placed on the ground, it becomes a kind of sculpture, a kind of body almost, lying down. I would like it to not look like much, that is to say, I would like it not to be spectacular, to have the modesty of the image that gave birth to it. I would like this bag to be able to become a bouquet. I would like us to slip poems printed on labels into the seams, almost invisible, almost secret. […] I would like this bag to be our secret, to be something almost ordinary when we don’t know it. I would like this bag to be a territory, I would like this bag to be a wasteland. I would like the students and I to know this bag not as a common object, but as a meeting place, like when we say «let’s meet under the bridge at 3 p.m.” and that we know which bridge we are talking about. “

Note of intent (excerpt), Andréa Spartà, 2024

The “Excellence Métiers d’Art” label is awarded to professional establishments that stand out for their original, high-quality training programs in the field of arts & crafts. The awarding of this label notably supports the implementation of artist residencies in partnership with cultural structures.