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Aurélien Dumont, Lara Hirzel, Emile de Visscher, and Gaëlle Hippolyte are renowned artists/researchers in the fields of music, cinema, design, and visual arts. They have been hosted at the Villa Medici and the Villa Kujoyama, and they teach and conduct their research at institutions such as EHESS and of Berlin. One thing they all have in common is their SACRe PhD. On , , a visual artist at EnsadLab and professor at the CAFA in Beijing, China, defended his dissertation and became the 30th PhD to come out of this unique doctoral program.
Created by the five major schools of art and creation associated with PSL and , SACRe (Sciences, Arts, Creation, Research) reflects a dual ambition: training a new generation of creative professionals to do research while stimulating exchanges and synergies between disciplines.
“Since its creation in 2012 as a doctoral program and consolidation in 2016 with the creation of a laboratory that brings together 122 members, SACRe has positioned itself as a significant contributor in the key sectors of arts research at the international level: research/creation, arts/science interfaces, and arts/societies interfaces. Graduated PhDs play a central role in this process of building, not only through the quality of their research work but also through the publicity they bring by publicly displaying their research. The most recent dissertation defenses and the outcomes for our PhDs clearly illustrate the success of this endeavor,” declares Emmanuel Mahé, director of SACRe.
 

“Shaking Up the Knowledge, Certainties, and Conditions for Artistic Creation”

SACRe’s PhD candidates come from a wide variety of backgrounds—composer, art historian, designer, film-maker, director—and are selected each year from more than 140 applications to fill 10 doctoral contracts. The program allows artists and designers to complete a PhD in art and design, building their practice upon a solid theoretical and scientific foundation. It also supports researchers in the humanities, both social and exact sciences, looking to complete a theoretical PhD on a topic that requires intimate knowledge of the artistic milieu and processes. Their varied research topics touch upon major contemporary issues such as the environment. Clémence Hallé, for example, is at ENS-PSL working on a SACRe PhD project entitled: “A contemporary envisioning of our environment: the curatorial history of the Anthropocene Project,” aiming to reconstruct the intellectual history of the Anthropocene by investigating it through theatrical performances, among other avenues. Meanwhile, fashion designer Jeanne Vicérial, entrepreneur and currently in residence at the Villa Medici, defended a dissertation in October 2019 entitled “Clinique Vestimentaire.” Based on her own practices and contemporary methods for clothing design, she worked with a laboratory to develop a process able to produce and sell custom clothing, producing no scraps, in small production runs on a semi-industrial scale.

Artists and scientists working within the same entity connect and talk to one another during seminars, exhibits, and learning days hosted by the laboratory. All these opportunities create a unique environment, described this way by Katia Sowels, an art historian with training in biology from ENS-PSL:
&�Բ�����;“At SACRe, I found an innovative environment where I could pursue my work within a community of researchers with complex and unusual backgrounds who, together, are shaking up the knowledge, certainties, and conditions for artistic creation.”

Fostering the Emergence of a New Generation of Artists and Scientists

As professional artists, professors, and researchers, many SACRe PhDs have had their work hailed and received awards. Of the 30 holders of that title: 5 have been hosted as artists in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, the Villa Kujoyama in Tokyo, or Ircam/ZKM; 4 have obtained research fellowships or post-doctoral fellowships at renowned international universities such as Humboldt University of Berlin, and others have been selected as participants or winners by the Sundance Institute, MIT Hacking Arts, the Imagine Science Film Festival, and elsewhere. Most recently, Lyes Hammadouche has already been recruited as a professor by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (CAFA International Foundation Course). Prior to that, he had displayed his work repeatedly at the Jérôme Pauchant gallery in Paris and participated in exhibits in such prestigious locations as the Palais de Tokyo.

“This PhD enabled me to propose new methods for research in design, and in this sense, it is of critical scientific and epistemological benefit in the French and international academic environment,” attests Emile de Visscher, artist and designer and currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Matters of Activity Cluster of Humboldt University of Berlin.

The doctoral studies program, which is the only one of its kind, raises questions for scientists and artists about crucial issues for research in the arts. Since 2017, for example, a special relationship has existed with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. After three days of meetings in Paris in December 2018, a SACRe delegation will visit the Harvard campus for a new workshop and a symposium in February 2020 bringing together major international arts programs from schools such as the University of California Santa Cruz and Goldsmiths - University of the Arts London.