Winter School Horizon(s)
Registrations are open until 6 January 2025*
Du 03.02.2025au 07.02.2025
workshop
experimentation
Every year between semesters, the school organises a week-long Winter School, bringing together more than 400 students from the first to the 4th year to discuss a common issue. Open to students at the school as well as to French and international students from outside the school, the Winter School is designed as a time for cross-disciplinary reflection, providing an opportunity to tackle a wide range of themes and to question architecture, the city and the territory. The approach is deliberately exploratory: the aim is to vary, over a short period of time, the teaching methods used in the project workshops and tutorials.
Horizon(s)
The theme 2025 was chosen by Giaime Meloni, photographer, artist, doctor of architecture, teacher and curator of this 10th edition of the exhibition.
The horizon represents not only the line that separates the earth and the sky, but also a vision towards the future. Between the concretisation of tangible elements and the evocation of intangible ideas, this duality inspires the 2025 theme.
How can the imaginary line of the horizon guide us in designing our future? By inviting reflection on this notion, in both its physical and metaphorical dimensions, the Winter School aims to examine how the future can be imagined and represented, paying particular attention to the way we live and interact with our future environment.
Description des workshops de la Winter School 2025
01. A for Animal
by François Deladerrière
In the interview film "l’Abécédaire", with the letter A, for Animal, Gilles Deleuze talks to us about the relationship of the animal to a territory. For the philosopher, every animal has a world.
If we want to rethink our relationship to the world, to adapt to this changing world, to reestablish a link to our environment, we can draw inspiration from the animal in its relationship to the territory. How to behave like an animal? How to invent a territory, how to see this territory as an animal? Being on the lookout, awakening one's senses, creating one's territory, observing, feeling and seeing will be the avenues explored during this week of research.
Supervised by François Deladerrière
François Deladerrière carries out projects related to landscapes. In 2013, he participated in the project “France(s) Territoires Liquides”. Since 2015, he has been pursuing collective work in a valley in the Dolomites where a dam disaster occurred. More recently, he moved to the Pyrenees for a research residency inspired by reading a novel by Rick Bass.
02. Dancers in the dark?
by Lina Lagerström
The digital horizon is decidedly optimistic. Information circulates instantly on a global scale, abolishing distances and making exchanges possible that were once unimaginable.
This interconnection allows ideas, knowledge, and experiences to be shared in unprecedented ways.
The workshop we have envisioned will bring together architecture students and aspiring dancers around the theme of the horizon and utopia. The architects will design a scenography inspired by utopian visions, while the dancers will create a choreography translating these ideas into body language. Each discipline will need to collaborate with the other to shape the final performance: the scenography creates the space where the dance evolves, and the choreography brings spatial concepts to life. The final performance will showcase the value of working together to imagine a shared horizon.
Supervised by Lina Lagerström
Trained in Sweden at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm with a year of exchange in France at the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, Lina Lagerström has worked in architectural firms in Paris on projects of various scales located in Europe and Asia. She continued her career with a professional experience in Tokyo, Japan. Since 2010, she has been working as an associate architect and co-founder at the agency SEPTEMBRE and joined Ensa Paris-Est as a contract teacher in 2023.
03. Grand (Hyper) Tour
by Rachel Rouzaud and Bernadetta Budzik
Our workshop explores the future of architecture through the prism of Timothy Morton's theory of hyperobjects. These vast and complex entities - like climate change or capitalism that shape contemporary culture and the environment. Drawing on Richard Weller's To the Ends of the Earth, we reinterpret the Grand Tour in the 21st Century, studying sites symbolic of a modernity such as Tesla's Megafactory, Amazon's distribution centres and Ceaușescu's architectural ambitions in communist Romania. We will examine how these landscapes evoke the sublime today and how they shed light on what tomorrow will be like.
Through the creation of textile tapestries, participants will materialise the invisible connections between hyperobjects and these symbolic territories of architecture today, offering a collective reflection on how these forces shape our environment.
Supervised by Rachel Rouzaud and Bernadetta Budzik
Rachel Rouzaud trained as an architect, but claims to be a ‘ maker’. Alongside her work, she makes rugs as tools of representation, domestic and artistic mediums, with the aim of weaving links between histories, cultures and disciplines, making architecture more accessible to non-architects.
Bernadetta Budzik is a Polish architect that one day left Poland just to see something different. Today she is living in Paris, working in an office by day and continuing her research by night. She is interested in connections between bodies and space, queer bodies in hetero-word, Eastern bodies in West, activists bodies in the streets… She writes, designs, work with wood and still trying to see something different.
04. La Grande Traversée
by Antoine Séguin and Jérémy Dru
La Grande Traversée is a bicycle tour through the new town of Marne-la-Vallée.
It's an immersion in its landscape, to come into contact with the urban and architectural elements that make it up, and the lifestyles that coexist there.
The Grande Traversée takes gentle itineraries, passing through the heart and margins of the city, crossing major expressways and railways, skirting natural and built features... sometimes all at the same time.
To cross this territory is to make the link between its diversities and put them in dialogue.
The bicycle is the surveying tool, enabling encounters and stops. Photography is the tool of storytelling, bearing witness to the richness of the journey, becoming a medium for reflection, recounting the present as well as the future, reality as well as the imaginary.
Supervised by Antoine Séguin and Jérémy Dru
Antoine Séguin is photographic artist born in 1986 near a nuclear power plant. Degree in architecture.
Documents urban bangs, margins, ruins, decay, life. Produces architectural and fashion photography commissions. Co-publisher of Exercice magazine.
Co-founder of GANG with Jérémie Dru, the duo leads photographic campaigns on bicycles across the country.
Jérémy Dru is an architect and photographer based in Montreuil.
Practicing analog photography, mixing visual experimentation and documentary.
Leads photo workshops for the general public with CAUEs and Maisons de l'Architecture, and introductions to reading territories in rural and urban settings. Introduction to photo printing with enlarger.
Co-founder of GANG
05. le temps suspendu
by Marion Boisset and Guillaume Lachat
"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?"
Drawing on this statement by the narrator of Sans Soleil (Chris Marker - 1983), 'le temps suspendu" aims not just to observe but to take account of the multiple relationships that students forget with their everyday environment. The school becomes a place of investigation where each plant, material or trace reveals the stories that make up the world. Through this collection, this weaving of fragments, the students are invited to bring back these traces and to inscribe in a collective memory the attachments that structure their territory.
Supervised by Marion Boisset and Guillaume Lachat
Marion Boisset is an architect who graduated from La Cambre Horta in Brussels. She has been working on domestic and territorial issues for several years. Since 2022, she has been teaching in the field of representation at the school of architecture Paris-Est, and this year she begins a research project on the notion of discomfort under the direction of Anna Rosellini and Sébastien Marot.
Guillaume Lachat studied architecture at ENSAPLV and UdK Berlin. At the same time, he began his photographic practice with Valérie Jouve and Stéphanie Nava. Between 2014 and 2024 he worked in Paris, Berlin and Pesmes, where he obtained his HMONP in 2016 with BQ+A. In 2024 he co-founded the studio mx architectural practice with Luca Eminenti Chanteau in Morlaix.
06. Seine-Saint-Denis : du village au quartier
by Stefan Cornic and Mathilde Sobottke
The aim of the workshop is to get students to work on making films about the horizons of the Olympic village in Seine-Saint-Denis, from the village to the neighbourhood.
In order to question urban planning issues and strategies that underlie this territory, 3 groups of 10 people will produce videos of around 3 min. in length, focusing on housing (1), infrastructure (2) and landscape (3).
To accompany these images, the groups will be asked to produce a voice-over that will be the subject of a literary reflection. Taking the form of either an epistolary exchange or an interior monologue, the voice will tell us about an experience, whether it’s specific to the group or the embodied rendition of testimonies collected during the shoot. This formal approach will force students to rediscover the path of sensation, and to project themselves into the shoes of characters expressing different points of view.
Supervised by Stefan Cornic and Mathilde Sobottke
With a Master degree in art history, Stefan Cornic is an independant writer and director.
He directs films in the field of art, architecture and cinema ("Le Grand Paris des écrivains" collection / "Les métamorphoses du Grand Palais"; "L'oeil, le pinceau et le Cinématographe"; "Jim Jarmusch, poèmes sur pellicule"...).
Mathilde Sobottke studied acting and works as a literary translator, speaker and editor of films and videos. She is interested in new audiovisual forms and regularly works on projects for the television channel ARTE. She has realised two personal film projects and is currently working on an object dealing with Alzheimer’s disease.
07. Les temps de l'arbre
by Anna Rosellini and Roberto Gargiani
The workshop proposes to approach time as a response, through the project, to the questions posed by the state of the environment. The tangible and the intangible become the foundations of a reflection aimed at determining a form of habitat articulated in fixed systems designed for a secular time horizon, and in systems open to continuous change, determined by the individual will of groups. The horizon line takes on the value of the one that was drawn on a sheet of paper in the years of radical protest to imagine alternative forms of habitat, in the climate of refusal and hope of that historic moment. In the current environmental and social crises, this same line becomes the horizon for imagining ways to go beyond the theoretical limits, design criteria and techniques of the present, in order to identify the possible foundations of an architecture for a time to come.
Supervised by Anna Rosellini and Roberto Gargiani
Anna Rosellini is full professor at the ENSA Paris-Est. Her recent research activities are devoted to the habitat, studied at different scales, starting from the essential unit that has taken the theoretical and practical form of the "room"; the materials of art; the role of exhibitions in the revision and presentation of the theoretical, social and political foundations of architecture.
Roberto Gargiani is professor emeritus at the EPF Lausanne. His research covers various aspects and periods of the history of architecture and construction and range from the Renaissance, to concrete construction, to works such as the Louvre or the Continuous Monument, to architects, engineers or groups such as Perret, Nervi, Le Corbusier, Kahn, Archizoom, Superstudio, Koolhaas, OFFICE KGDVS.
08. Manual for a Catastrophe
by Francesca Gotti et Giovanni Emilio Galanello
In the book “The Machine Stops” the author E.M. Forster narrates of a catastrophic scenario where the surface of the Earth has become inhabitable and humans had to adapt by building an hyper-technological underground city. The book dates back to 1909, and so far the ideas around adaptation to apocalyptic scenarios produced by natural and human disasters have nurtured a flourishing bibliographical, filmography and design apparatus.
Reflecting on the assumption that adaptation to global changes is the ultimate desperate answer, we will investigate possible tactics to address catastrophic horizons through the production of objects and spatial devices with a collective dimension. We will set our artefacts inside dioramas of various scales and natures, that will define our point of departure. Envisioning tangible scenarios and solutions, we will critically test our response to survivalism, mutualism, disasters through adaptation.
Supervised by Francesca Gotti et Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Francesca Gotti is an architect and researcher, engaged in practices of spatial selfproduction and shared management, acting through simulations, workshops, installations.
She coordinates initiatives of collective reuse of urban commons. She is completing her PhD at Politecnico di Milano, on the topic of architecture for empowerment. She is an assistant for Léopold Banchini, at USI (Mendrisio).
G.E. Galanello is an independent photographer, focusing on ordinary landscapes, and the territories-memory relation.
He published the books 'Gli Stati delle Anime' (2021) and ‘Sotto le Pietre, il Sale’ (x01, 2024).
In 2023 he took part in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
He collaborates with design practices, associations and magazines.
Represented by Galerie Kernweine.
09. Photographier les marges du Grand Paris, la marche attentive
by Christophe Caudroy
How to photograph? What subject? What representation for a vague notion? The Paris urban agglomeration is in a state of constant evolution, expanding and developing, particularly to the east. Beginning from the RER A line, this workshop will focus on capturing the conurbation in Seine-et-Marne and its boundaries. What horizons exist at the edge of the city? When do we leave it behind? Walking and urban drifting, freely inspired by the situationist Guy Debord, will serve as our methodological tools for engaging with these spaces. By posing questions about the photography of these margins and their exhibition, we will reflect on what constitutes a city, and when and how it concludes. The photographic forms and proposals will be varied, encompassing studio shots of collected objects, urban landscapes, architectural photography, and portraits.
Supervised by Christophe Caudroy
Christophe Caudroy is a photographer for 20 years, urban spaces, architecture, and the relationship between humans and their environment inform his commissioned work and personal projects. The density of Southeast Asia and the disrupted spaces of the Middle East have been his fields of exploration in recent years. He also teaches photography at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière.
10. Performer et redessiner l’histoire
Construire les récits d’un usage
by Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques and Alejandro Hernandez
The workshop will involve producing narratives based on the archives of Black Mountain College (1933-1957), both on the notions of commons and community and on architectural issues. Students and teachers constructed the buildings of their school, initially designed by Gropius and Breuer, then finally by Kocher.
Based on primary archives and a reflection on the contemporary, the students will produce scenarios that envisage the updating of Black Mountain today, in terms of architecture. We will produce comic strips from photographs with the help of generative AI tools, whose narratives will be constructed collectively during conversations. Questions of community, utopia and collective experience will be at the heart of our reflections, as will the principle of technological updating through photography, virtualisation and 3D, in line with Black Mountain's founding principle of ‘learning by doing’.
Supervised by Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques and Alejandro Hernandez
Artist and researcher Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques is currently a doctoral student at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles and the Université Aix-Marseille. He is currently working on the concept of retcon and the history of Black Mountain College, with the central idea of whether this unique institution can be revived in the current context.
His work has been exhibited internationally and received several prestigious awards, including solo exhibitions at BAL in Paris (Standards & Poors, 2013), C/O Berlin ( Sub Rosa, 2019) and the Aperture Foundation in New York (Eden, 2016). In 2017 he was resident at the Académie de France in Madrid - Casa deVelàzquez and in 2024 at the Villa Albertine in the United States.
His work can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York, the JP Morgan Collection, the French National Art Collection (FNAC), the Neuflize OBC Collection, the Deutsche Börse Foundation, the Fondation Hermès Collection and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, among others.
couzinetjacques.com
Alejandro Hernandez has a degree in interior architecture and specialises in the representation of architecture in computer-generated images. In 2017, he founded jeudi.wang with Samuel Periz. They will be joined by Gerardo Zarra and Michael Kaplan, with whom they are passionate about simulating reality and its irregularities. Their demand for natural visualisation has enabled them to collaborate with around a hundred contemporary architects. jeudi.wang now has around thirty perspectivists in Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Bucharest.
11. Poursuivre l’horizon
by Eva Maloisel, Deborah Feldman and Jean-Benoît Vétillard
“Travel (...) was not a transitional activity marking the passage from one place to another, but a way of being... the act of traveling from a point of departure to a place of arrival plays a role in defining the identity of the traveler.”
Tim Ingold, The life of lines, 2011
We'll be looking at what human beings invented to elevate their bodies and discover the land from above: the aerostat. Embodying at the same time the most advanced technology and one of the strongest imaginations of human beings, that is to flying, this object fascinates us. These vessels try to make us belong to the sky. They launch us in pursuit of the horizon, as the air moves.
We'll be asking ourselves how these flying architectures, weaving an intimate link between body, landscape and horizon, can inform us about the use of the most advanced techniques in the service of inventing new imaginaries.
Supervised by Eva Maloisel, Deborah Feldman and Jean-Benoît Vétillard
Architect and teacher at Ensa Paris-Est, Eva Maloisel is one of the three Peaks partners. The agency sees each project as an open question about architecture practice, through the manipulation of its production conditions, its formal expression, program and its materiality.
Architect, researcher and teacher at ENSA Paris Est, Deborah Feldman is co-founder of the 127af architectural office. In the fourth year of her thesis in architecture and anthropology at Paris Nanterre, she is studying the metamorphosis of the boundaries separating the realms of private and public life.
Since 2009, Jean-Benoît Vétillard has pursued a personal practice where all scales are approached; where art, scenography and architecture, cohabit without any preconceived hierarchy. In 2014, he founded Jean-Benoît Vétillard - Architecture. He teaches at Ensa Paris-Est.
12. Resilience
by Cinzia Romanin
The workshop will consist in the production of a documentary photographic project by teams of two students on a site that represent, in their opinion, the concept of resilience.
The aim of the workshop will be to meet an emblematic figure from the chosen site in order to draw up a portrait. By making the exercise of exploring a user's experience, the students will be able to exercise their ability to create one sensitive and narrative image, while confronting their own vision with other’s. By using the photographic medium as an intrinsically social and reflexive tool, the workshop aims to challenge not only the architect's elitist position, but also the architectural photography's stereotype which too often excludes social and environmental dimensions. By the end of the week, a group show will be produced by the student to exhibit the photographic research around the school.
Supervised by Cinzia Romanin
Cinzia Romanin is a Belgian and Italian visual artist. After having graduated in architecture, she continued her studies at the Venice school of photography. Influenced by this specific background, her work is characterised by a particular interest in ecological, social and territorial dimensions.
13. Sgraffito ou divertissement pour les jeunes gens
by Camilla Cardia and Théophile Noyer
In the aftermath of the fall of the Republic of Venice, Giandomenico Tiepolo withdrew from public life and produced the cycle of frescoes on the hilarious Polichinelle, along with the album of drawings "Divertimento per li regazzi".
Tiepolo's experience leads to consider amusement and play, in its true philosophical nature, while facing the crisis.
Here, the architecture of the world, in its complexity and thickness, is re-examined by the exhumation of the sgraffito technique, a bichromatic scheme revealed by the scraping of thin layers of lime.
The creation of a board game is the playful recapitulation of images emerging from a collective reflection, analogous to an act of vandalism, shaped by the sensitivity of youth and the heritage of ancestors.
Supervised by Camilla Cardia and Théophile Noyer
Camilla Cardia studied architecture and art of space between Italy and France. Anchoring her reflection in the game as a symbol of the world, her practice investigates the collective perception of space and its modalities of narrative through different media.
Théophile Noyer is a graduate of ENSA Paris-Est. After experience in contemporary architectural production, he became interested in interventions in built heritage through his collaboration with the Antoine Dufour architects agency. In this research on the ruin and the archetype, he leads a pictorial practice through the work of oil painting.
14. Sur le bord
by Sandrine Marc and Laurent Koetz
In the proposed workshop we would like to construct a science fiction story taking as its starting point a future state of the world characterised by the appearance of a new boundary.
While today's technology enables us to reach any point on the globe, in the situation we have imagined something would have radically circumscribed our inhabited territory.
The exercise would involve imagining the end of this world, the edge that would have become our new horizon. We would then have to imagine what life would be like there: what would the geography be like? What would the ground and sky be like?
What would the climate be like? Is this space natural or artificial? It would also be a question of deciding whether this frontier could be inhabited: would it be totally hermetic? Practicable? Inhabitable? Who could inhabit it? In what way?
Supervised by Sandrine Marc and Laurent Koetz
Sandrine Marc is an artist, photographer and graphic designer who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2005. Her research focuses on the representation of space and its transformation. For the last twenty years, her photography has combined documentary and experimental approaches. With or without a commission, she takes, collects and assembles fragments extracted from the territories she experiences on foot. Architecture, landscape, the place of the body in public space, plants, materials and light make up an archive of the everyday, offering a sensitive reading of our ways of living. To activate her images, she designs publications, installations and films. Her work has been exhibited and presented in a number of art centres, institutions and festivals. Sandrine Marc has been teaching at Ensa Paris-Est since 2018.
Laurent Koetz is an architect who graduated from ENSA Paris-Belleville in 1993 and has been a lecturer since 2006. He joined the Ensa Paris-Est in 2013.
His research takes a cultural approach to the history of technology. In particular, he addresses the issue of innovation and examines the role of little-known or marginalised players in the development of discourses and practices in which invention plays a central role.
15. Tomorrow Papers
by Laure Veyre de Soras, Alice Lapierre and Vilém Koreny
The future is not yet; by definition, it cannot be written or illustrated. But we can find traces of the future in the present, and we can try to imagine it. We can also fantasize about it. So, by setting up a participatory editorial committee, we're aiming to produce a catalog that's both forward-looking and abundant. The abundance of content is neither definitive nor exhaustive, but a means of stimulation through which the act of classifying is not trivial; on the contrary, all selected documents will be conceptualized, transformed and reused through a process of montage and assembly. Tomorrow Papers will be a
possible fresco of a desirable future, a speculation on living together in which the collective action carried out during the week will itself be documented and restructured. And anyway, as Mick Jagger sang, who wants yesterday's papers ?
Supervised by Laure Veyre de Soras, Alice Lapierre and Vilém Koreny
Laure Veyre de Soras studied at TU Berlin and Ensa Lyon. She collaborated with LIN in Berlin (2012) and DATA in Paris (2013), where she works as project director. In 2014, together with Magali Michaud, she presented the exhibition “Hello I love you, won't you tell me your name?” featuring their encounters with 18 agencies around the world. She is currently a project teacher at Ensa Paris-Est.
Alice Lapierre was graduated as an architect in 2017 from Ensa Paris-Est. Previously studied Modern Literature and pursued academic research in Cinema. Launched her own practice in 2024 by founding the office radar. Participated in leading the workshop "Chance encounters" during the 2022 Winter School, Architecture as Choreography.
Vilém Koreny was born in Prague in 1991, Czech Republic. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, PUCP Lima (Peru), and the Czech Technical University (ČVUT). He graduated in 2018 from ČVUT in the studio of David Kraus. Between 2017 and 2024, he worked at DATA architects in Paris. In 2024, he founded his own architectural firm, Ateliér Altàn.
16. Vivaces
by Céline Clanet
Alliances, balances, adjustments, symbioses, interdependencies, metamorphoses, harmony, reiteration, solidity, stability, flexibility… the plant world offers us an
exceptional spectacle of adaptive strategies for its survival.
In the forest as in the urban space (or even in wastelands), we will search for plants and trees that resist, adapt, transform, seek their balance, or simply coexist with non-plant elements. What can we learn from this intelligence?
Just as natural shapes inspired Charlotte Perriand and expanded her practice, walk and photographic exploration will make us aware of the potential for inspiration offered by the forms and forces of the living world.
Supervised by Céline Clanet
Céline Clanet, a graduate of ENSP Arles, is interested in wild landscapes and their inhabitants, and has been working on the Arctic since 2005. In 2023 is published “Ground Noise” (Actes Sud) about the invisible worlds of the forest. Winner of the “Grande Commande BnF” she created “Les Ilots Farouches”, about French wild spaces. In 2024 “Second Skin” is published, about the bear.
Registration procedures for external students
The procedure described below does not apply to Ensa Paris-Est students.
Eligibility
Open to all French and foreign students currently studying in the fields of architecture, urban planning, photography, image or art and design.
2 ECTS can be validated subject to the agreement of the school of origin.
Calendar
Applications are accepted until 6 January 2025.
The number of places open to external applicants is limited.
Procedure
To register, send an email to Nassima Baloul, with the following supporting documents:
First name and surname
Telephone number and postal address
Copy of your identity card or passport
Copy of your school leaving certificate for the current year (or equivalent)
Copy of civil liability certificate.
As soon as we receive these documents, we will send you a secure payment link ‘Payboxmail’.
The subject of the e-mail must include the words ‘Winter School 2025 Registration’.
Enrolment fee
90 euros per student
Accommodation, meals and travel costs are not covered.
Payment is made via a secure link ‘Payboxmail’.
*This procedure is reserved for external students and does not apply to students at the school.
A look back at Winter Scholl 2024 with a wide selection of student work
Behind the scenes at Winter School 2023
on youtube
Sponsors and partners
Boesner
ENS Louis Lumière
Photo credit
Cinzia Romanin, Trascendence, 2023