Paris Graffiti Exhibit Spells IFE

On July 7 the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art opened a major exhibition entitled "Born in the Streets – Graffiti", devoting the entire exhibition space of the Foundation to it as well as the gardens and the exterior facade of the Foundation’s striking building on the Boulevard Raspail. While tracing the contours of this complex movement, the show also highlights contemporary work, including invitations extended to nearly a dozen contemporary "writers" to create temporary works both within the gallery space as well as on the facade.

Several students of IFE’s Paris Field Study and Internship Program have had a hand in the development of the Cartier’s graffiti exhibition. Above all, Leanne Sacremone, who was an IFE Field Study intern at the Pompidou Center in 1990 and now curator at the Cartier Foundation, has been a driving force behind the realization of this sweeping and technically challenging show.

Along the way she enlisted the help first of Nanaho K., a student at Brown University and IFE Field Study intern, who last Fall contributed not only logistically, with the many aspects of the detailed exhibition arrangements, but also reflectively with a field study paper on the multiple aspects of the question on exhibiting works of graffiti art in all of its aesthetic, ethical, technical and legal ambiguity.

More recently Leanne turned to Meredith R., a graduate of Vassar College who in 2005 had been a Field Study intern at Prada and returned recently to Paris to enroll directly in a Master’s program in Art History at the University of Paris IV. Meredith began working as a intern at the Cartier in April to help with the final stages of mounting this ambitious and unique exhibition.

IFE Field Partner Report: Human Rights League finds France wrong on rights

A number of past and present IFE Field Study interns interested in various questions of human rights, immigration and related topics have had the good fortune to intern with the legal services department of France’s leading watchdog group, the Human Rights League (La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme). The department head is, in addition, a member of the IFE Board of Overseers. So it is with a bit of insider’s pride that IFE calls attention to the critical role played by the LDH in human rights protection in France, as seen in their recently issued 2009 Annual Report (covered in depth by the daily newspaper Liberation, April 9, 2009).

The LDH chose to focus this year’s report on the theme of "generalized surveillance", prompted by the government’s proposed generalized police information file on individuals ("EDVIGE") and the immense outcry it provoked, forcing the government back to the drawing board. The bad news is that all the warning signs are flashing: detentions for questioning have skyrocketed; social workers report increasing police pressure to cooperate; policing culture has been invaded by a preoccupation with quantitative results; and new technological means are being pressed into service to collect information without provoking citizen ire.

The good news is that citizen ire is nonetheless being provoked. LDH’s president notes that "this has been a year of citizen reawakening... Civil society has never been so active as now." The report finds that a "society of surveillance" and a "society of solidarity" are developing simultaneously in France. Foreign visitors to France are often bemused or irked or both by the culture of strikes, stoppages and social protest they observe. But human rights are a crucial topic in France today, and not only in France, and observers may well be glad to see some good old French citizen non-passivity stirring to life.

"...Once They’ve Seen Paree"

It’s not quite true that you could walk across Paris on the heads of former IFE Field Study interns who have elected to return to the City of Lights either for a season or permanently, but the number of such decisions is increasing.

Recent re-Parisians include Nicole S. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a Field Study intern in the Spring of 2007 with AIDS education and prevention group Cyber-CRIPS (a not-for-profit focused on working with youth and where Nicole was highly appreciated), returned this summer with IFE’s help to work with Act Up Paris, where she pitched in on preparations for the 20th anniversary celebration of this lively organization as well as for the Solidays festival.

Lisa J., a student with IFE’s Goucher College Paris Program in the Fall of 2009, returned to Paris this summer with IFE’s help to work with the on-line literary review Parutions.com including interviews and reviews in preparation for the opening of the Fall 2009 literary season.

Claudia M., Vassar College ’08 and Field Study intern in Spring 2007 with the international relations think tank IRIS, has landed with IFE’s help a post as long-term intern with Luis Vuitton in the "intellectual property" department. Claudia will be helping hunt down fraudulent uses of the famous monogram.

Alexandria H, a UCLA post-grad and Field Study intern this past Spring with the food services firm SSP, has with IFE’s backing signed a six-month prolongation of her internship as a marketing assistant with SSP, with the company expressing interest in hiring Alexandria full-time in this capacity at the end of the period.

These are some recent additions to the ranks of IFE alums who turn their work experience in France – with some IFE support and their own French networks developed as interns – into a follow-on sojourn in France, short medium or long term. Once a student at IFE, always a student at IFE !

Veranda or Vantage Point?

A recent paper on improving contact and familiarity with local cultures in study abroad programs (Anthony Ogden: "The View from the Veranda: Understanding today’s colonial student"; Frontiers, Vol XV, Fall/Winter 2007-8) demonstrates at least in the case of IFE that it is possible to be ahead of the curve without realizing there is a curve.

As the article underlines, much study abroad faces the difficulties inherent in the "veranda", a colonial image used to describe the position of an outside actor setting up shop in a particular culture for the purpose of meeting goals exogenous to that culture. A second problem crops up as programs seek to provide greater contact: when is "experience" learning?

Born and raised as a French not-for-profit organization, IFE’s advantage for two decades has been its field context, where there is no house and no veranda. Another advantage in the current climate is 22 years experience using the work place as both vantage point and field experience to produce valid learning outcomes, including but not limited to cultural learning.

The current debate focuses on suggestions and ideas for greater involvement with which IFE is in full agreement, because it has seen them work! These include recognizing and explicitly speaking to students about their risk-averse predilection for only comfortable experience; taking preparation seriously even when "colonial" students don’t see the need; thinking creatively about involving students locally; constructing a broad and deep "contact zone", working with students to examine and if need be change the demands they bring to their education abroad, and other similar avenues explored by IFE in its ongoing search to foster meaningful inter-cultural learning.