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Concorde Station

To write the Human Rights at the Concorde Subway Station in Paris, is the founding project of Association INSCRIRE


Date:
3 December 2020
Year :
1989-1991
Location :
Paris, France

“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789

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The Concord subway station, built-in 1991 below the Place de la Concorde in Paris is the first public artwork of the international network of Human Rights projects launched by the artist Françoise Schein.

Initiated in 1989, the year of the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the beginning of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Concorde subway station is entirely covered by the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the French Revolution of 1789. Two hundred years separate the events in Paris and Berlin.

To spark the traveler’s curiosity, the artist removed all spaces and punctuations between the words. The traveler first sees only a huge block of 44,000 letters. 1000m2 of Garamond letters on ceramic squares. At first glance, the public does not recognize any meaningful content. The wall appears only as a giant puzzle of arbitrarily placed letters. But gradually, the recognition of the language appears in the reader’s mind, to give it meaning and create one’s understanding of the text.

The Concord subway station is the reason why the artist Françoise Schein chooses transportation locations (subways) and forgotten spaces (favelas) to inscribe her artworks, because they are part of this new world state composed of networks and connections, global interconnected structures, and rhizomes on the interplanetary scale.

It was after the construction of this project that Françoise Schein decided to establish the INSCRIRE Association.

CONTRIBUTORS

TLV Trato
Claude Tautel
Thibault Boyer

SPONSORS

RATP

PROJECT LED BY

Françoise Schein

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