Françoise Schein, founder of Inscrire
Inscribing the vision of utopia: her vision in her words.

For a long time now, I have been interested in cities and their unique designs: their foundations and the ideas that they grew out of and that they generate. As an architect, urban planner and artist, I started first with drawings, maps and representations. I then moved onto sculptures and, little by little, I began to envision urban projects that I could integrate into the cities themselves. This perspective led me to create projects in the very depths and heart of urban networks, to that place where people circulate, the subway. I have come to see cities and villages as living beings who tell stories of the lives that have crossed through and in them, thereby leaving indelible marks on the successive strata of the city’s foundations. My projects pay homage to that reality.

It was through working on the physical mapping of cities that I discovered how human rights principles were a geological bed on which societies had transformed into permanent, physical democracies: that is, the conception, expression and recognition of human rights was an integral component in defining the physical form that cities, societies, and communities ultimately took. From that moment on, I was determined to incorporate written expressions of fundamental human rights, such as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, into my projects; thus emerged the urban inscription project that is the backbone work of Inscrire today. By inscribing this and other fundamental expressions of the rights of man in artworks throughout the world, we leave behind indelible reminders to all who see them.




It was the feeling that we should never stop inscribing these texts that drove me to begin working in the Concorde Metro Station in Paris in 1989, covering its walls with ceramice tiles of letters, that write out the text of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. I continued to Brussels, Lisbon and Haifa, to Berlin and Stockholm, into the shantytowns (favelas) of Rio de Janeiro, and now onto Bremen, Kabul and the villages of the European Community.

With the support of volunteers and others who share this vision, little by little, letter by letter, we have constructed walls of ideas that read like an open book, made of earth that lay beneath and within our communities.

Somewhere between cities and words, a link was created out of which came the idea to work with local populations themselves to complete these projects. In Rio de Janeiro, we have established a ceramics workshop, where the people from each community come to write out the texts and learn the ancestral technique of painting on ceramic tiles. It is their tiles that become the art installation created in each of their neighborhoods. Not only are they educated on the rights to which they are entitled, but learning the techniques gives them know-how and a potential livelihood. This extension of the projects has both a pedagogical dimension and gives a social purpose to Inscrire’s dissemination of human rights.

Françoise Schein,
Paris, 10th of June 2009.

 

 

© Copyright Association Inscrire 2009