Hespérus

Association for intercultural artistic mediation

Our association promotes artistic expression among people who are far from creation. The artists of the association, coming from various artistic fields such as photography, cinema, theatre, dance, music, plastic arts and writing, propose to carry out their missions through specific methods of intervention which aim to reinforce mediation, interdisciplinarity, cooperation, transversality, exchanges, interculturality and openness to difference.

Enhancing social contact processes through artistic disciplines: here’s the heart of the Hespérus project. The variety of expression of the artistic media carried by the association and the creativity thus generated aim at a social project based, upstream, on the creation of a strong bond between the participants.

The design of the projects is mainly intended for institutions, social structures and non-governmental organizations that wish to develop mediation workshops led by artists, for targeted audiences. In these particular contexts, the mediation space becomes a window to a new universe, to a self-narrative, reconciled by the collective experience that the participants create through their artistic expression.

Hespérus, with its team of artists, employs alternative routes to make these so-called “remote” audiences express themselves when oral or written language is lacking, by giving voice to the images, bodies, writing and to self-expression that spring from these artistic experiences. The association’s objective is to dismantle the social barriers faced by specific audiences.

Artistic education in the service of social work thus appears to be a privileged means of access to new knowledge and to a form of awareness and enhancement. It allows to overcome the obstacles linked to linguistic, cultural or social problems; the participants venture on this journey with the same luggage: their subjectivity, their imagination and their mode of expression.

These artistic projects provide a different social and human experience mediated by professionals who are passionate about their artistic field; they create bonds and new ways of living together, exploring the richness, differences and creativity of each person.

OBJECTIVES

Discovery
During the workshops, the artist proposes to the participants the discovery of his discipline. The exploration of the proposed expressive medium will be an opportunity for the public to encounter different artistic practices and to create a project.

Enhancement
At the end of the adventure, the implementation of the achievements and experiences is enhanced through the staging of a performance, an exhibition, a book, a trip, a film, or a cultural exchange with another country.

Synergy
Setting up artists’ residencies and cultural projects in France and abroad, thanks to a network of contacts with other associations, NGOs, cultural centres, social facilities, schools and institutions.

CHALLENGES

To encourage and develop personal expression through artistic creation

To engage in processes at the intersection of exchange and interculturality

To encourage human relationships, to enter into dialogue with the participants during the artistic experience and thus to foster the encounter with the other.

Justine Verneret, the founder of Hespérus

The Hespérus association is part of an individual path made of discoveries and initiatives in the artistic field, and of a relationship with visual language that has been built up over the years.

Born in 1980 in Lyon, Justine Verneret came up with the idea of creating an association in 2019, during a training course for her University Diploma in Conflict Management, Mediation and Interculturality at the Catholic University of Lyon. Holder of a diploma from the School of Applied Arts of the city of Lyon in 2004 and a master’s degree in journalistic design at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona in 2005, she subsequently developed an artistic and pedagogical practice through the photographic medium and that of the plastic arts with institutions, educational and social structures.

In 2011, she founded the contemporary photography gallery BlooGallery in Rome, Italy. In 2016, she intervened at the Bloo School of Photography in Lyon, teaching courses on the history of photography. In 2016, she also gave literacy classes at the Joel Nafuma refugee centre in Rome.

It was especially between 2004 and 2010, during her plastic art classes in secondary schools and high schools, and her first workshops in local schools and in a prison centre, that the evidence of the social and human power of certain artistic media, became obvious. Power of expression, power of liberation, power of connection: these are the key concepts of her artistic missions. The visual language, and in particular photography, appears to be the right mediation and the promising alliance between the inner and the outer world, between the singular and the collective, between “I” and “the Other”.

The exploration of different mediums from multi-disciplinary artistic fields, during mediatory actions is an important part of her professional experience that led to the creation of the Hespérus association.