Production Workshop - Théâtre Hexagone, Meylan (Grenoble), France, June 2nd-6th, 2025

Context

The Production workshop concludes the EPE project's workshop-based cooperation program, after 5 workshops resulting in the production of around 25 experimental editorial projects, bringing together groups of students from different educational backgrounds and countries, crossing screen and paper using web-to-print technologies. The two years of the project were divided into two main phases, Propagation and Prototyping, with the final phase involving an attempt at full-scale Production, in a quasi-professional context. The Hexagone theater, a national scene located in the town of Meylan in the Grenoble metropolis, is our major partner for this last in situ action. In order to fulfill its mission of artistic production and distribution, mainly in the performing arts, the Hexagone has a small-scale communications team: 2 people invest their time in organizing and distributing information that will enable the public to discover the theater's program. Websites, posters and flyers are all tools already in place in the theater's communications, but one specific activity suffers from a certain invisibility: artist residencies, which appear only very occasionally in the institution's overall communications, and sometimes under several forms and names. Our proposition is that a team of people belonging to the EPE consortium participate in a workshop to produce plausible editorial chains dedicated to the valorization of activities generated by Hexagone's artist residencies: intermediate realizations, documents produced by the artists (texts, images, videos, audio recordings), public performances, master classes, etc.

Orientations

“Doing what you can with what you've got” will go hand in hand with “tailor-made production”: as Hexagone cannot easily expand its communications team, the challenge is to analyze the needs when they are known, or, if not, to formulate them and propose editorial channels adapted to these needs and to the scale of the team in place. The variety of media potentially produced by guest artists calls for flexibility in the system for managing the sources that will be used to produce media that will add value to these residencies. This flexibility needs to be reflected in the editing tool that will enable those responsible for distributing this content to lay it out both on screen and on paper. We can therefore imagine a CMS-type tool built around the needs and proposals for distribution formats that will be designed in collaboration with the Hexagone team: desktop and mobile website with the possibility of printing simple objects (posters, flyers, stapled A5 booklets, etc.) on site or directly at the spectators' homes. The content management tool would allow a minimum of graphic adjustments: positioning of elements, styles. Depending on the format concerned (booklet, for example), an automatic page layout can be introduced, with certain content marked as having to fill predetermined page zones. Several editing chain hypotheses will be put forward, and one of them will be explored in greater depth to verify its suitability for real-life use. However, this will not be a finalized product available for use, but rather a prototype close to the “proof of concept” stage, which could eventually give rise to further developments to finalize the solution chosen by the Hexagone team.

Organization

The workshop took place at Atelier arts science from June 02 to 06 2025:

Y.SPOT PARTNERS / ATRIUM 5 place Nelson Mandela 38000 Grenoble https://www.atelier-arts-sciences.eu/

The partners taking part in this workshop are: L’Hexagone, l’Esad•Valence, l’ISAM de Sfax, Izmir Economics - VCD, Sarah Garcin.

Participants

Esad•V

• Cédric Rossignol
• Romain Laurent
• Raphaël Bottura
• Dominique Cunin
• Sarah Garcin – Esad•V guest

ISAM Sfax

Professors

• Ikbel Charfi
• Sonda Kammoun

Students

• EYA BOUAZIZ
• BEA AYADI (online - no visa)
• JED HMIDA (online - no visa)
• Yassine Fendri
• Farah Maalej

• Izmir Economics VCD

  Professors

• SAVASTA Daniele

Students

• Azra Karasu
• TUNC Oguz Ulgen

Hexagone

• Nathalie Soulier
• Jade Voirin
• Laurence Bardini

Schedule

Sunday 1st June

Participants get to Grenoble from their respective working place.

Monday 2nd June

Morning

Reviewing the information provided by Hexagone: the starting point is at the crossroads of the Cahiers and the Rapports d'étonnement to formulate proposals for generic formats:

• • Situate the types of residences in place,
• • Analyze the existing Cahiers,
• • Analyze the formats of the Rapports d'étonnement (who is it intended for, what type of information is presented, in what quantity, etc.),
• • Understand the future of residences in their diversity and partnerships

Presentation of an initial chain in Single Source Publishing, enabling a set of files to be used by several participants. Students will design editorial objects using this information.

Afternoon

Two parallel sessions :

1. Learning session: Clarification of the concept of Single Source Publishing + introduction to the techniques involved (local PHP server, HTML, CSS, CMS, Terminal, etc.). Brief reminder of Paged.js, demonstration of graphic articulations between screen and paper formats.

2. Formatting existing data and making it available on a local server, setting up the main technical chain for the rest of the workshop.

End of session: short demonstration of the proposed chain.

Tuesday

Morning

Sarah Garcin presents the projects she has already implemented that are in line with WS expectations. Listing of editorial principles relevant to Hexagone. Consider the need for formats aimed at a wide audience and scientific publications (art-science residencies).

Afternoon

Collective working session, defining major hypotheses for general workflows:

• • interactive interfaces,
• • organization of formats between them (chaining),
• • based on paper sketches or visual flowcharts. At the end of the session, a workflow will be decided on as the basis for work over the following days.

Wednesday

Morning

Team organization:

• • the student team works on tests of graphic formats based on the data in place in JSON (non-paginated formats, such as posters, flyers, etc.)
• • a sub-team or a individual student works on the graphic representation of the workflows (A3 posters).
• • the designers/teachers (Sarah, Cédric and Raphael in particular, along with volunteer colleagues) work on the technical implementation of the main workflow.

Afternoon

Graphic format tests: layout initiation (page layout, graphic and typographic choices)

Thursday

Mock-up continuation. Finalization of a representation of the workflow to be shown and print tests.

Friday

Printing and production of objects.

On-site workshop presentation: 3:30pm.