Please briefly present the organisation/group (e.g. its type, scope of work, areas of activity and if
applicable, approximate number of paid/unpaid staff, learners and members of the group).

L’Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts, ISBA (Besançon Institute of Fine Arts) has a long history dating
back to the beginning of the 18th Century when a Royal Academy was founded in the center of the
town where it remained until it was relocated to the Bouloie campus in 1972. The school is part of the
20th century architectural heritage designed by the famous Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert. We
are especially proud of its Maeght Foundation buildings. The school continues to develop within the
network overseen by the Ministry for Culture, and in particular as part of the platform of institutes of
higher artistic education in the Burgundy−Franche−Comté region.

Work areas are spread over a space of 7 000 m2 (over 75,000 square feet), specifically designed as
an Art school. The work areas include technical workshops, workshops for personal research,
maintenance and repair rooms, classrooms, a large library, conference room, galleries and exhibition
rooms, artists’ residencies and administrative areas.
There are common technical workshops in art fields such as : drawing, painting, engraving, screen
printing, letterpress printing, volume, video, sound, a photo laboratory, computer graphics, wood,
metal and a painting and laser engraving booth for our 216 students to use, with 24 permanent
teachers, 10 non-permanent academics and 14 administrative and technical staff ready to give
advice. From their third year upwards students have personal studio space for their work.
ISBA is a school of higher education in Visual Arts which prepares students for a Master’s degree
either in Art or Visual Communication (The Higher National Diploma of Visual Art). Our school, which
involves the entirety of the educational team (art teachers, researchers, teachers from outside,
assistants, instructors and the technical and administrative team) revolves around two main
principles which may be presented through the development of three essential objectives.
The two principles which legitimize our action concern the importance we give to the fine line
between our desire to be deeply rooted within the region and that of being increasingly open to the
outside world. This is defined by being a successful and renowned school but which is not at all a
place that excludes, but rather which welcomes all strata of society.

The first principle is the notion of being “Glocal”, as in the ideas of Edouard Glissant and Kenneth
White : claiming that to be fully oneself, one must see oneself as being a “human crossroads” : open
to all the cultural winds. Also, the school, as a local centuries−old Besançon school, can only
continue on the path it is destined for, given the fact that from this region came such people as Victor
Hugo, Charles Fourier, Pierre−Joseph Proudhon, Gustave Courbet, but also the LIP (a local workers’
strike movement) and the CLA (Centre for Applied Linguistics) all of which have become references
world−wide. In a way, we are cosmopolitans because we are from Besançon and from
Franche−Comté. Being open to others is being true to oneself.

Our second principle is based on our belief that although we strive for excellence, as is amply seen
by the exam results, this is not synonymous with a desire for social exclusion. It is proven that :
creation in art or in graphic design have always been richer when it comes from individual ideas that
have not been moulded by the system. ISBA (Besançon Institute of Fine Arts) is not a school with a
single style or profile of student. Neither does its pedagogy come from a pseudo−Darwinism where
the “survival of the fittest” means stamping out the weaker ones, nor is it based on Spenglerian’s
“Struggle for life”. ISBA, like its Russian homonym, is a shared house where each person is invited to
come and meet others, regardless of their differences, difficulties, origins, academic background, or
age. Our classrooms, to put it simply, resemble real life, and we are sure that artists see the world
better in this multicoloured sparkling environment than in a place where ‘purebreds’ are churned out.

ANOTHER ONE: 

erg, école de recherche graphique, école supérieure des arts, is an art school based in Brussels,
existing since 1972. It counts currently 470 students in Bachelor and Master degrees, around 90
teachers, 10 employees and is part of a bigger structure, Instituts St Luc which gathers 5 institutions
from a secondary school from social advancement education. These institutions share with erg the
finance, IT and maintenance departments for a better efficiency.

The specificity of the erg’s teaching method lies in its inter- or trans-disciplinary approach,
guaranteed by the way students and teachers interact across various disciplines: video, painting,
photography, sculpture, drawing, installation-performance, digital arts, typography, graphic design,
visual and graphic communication, illustration, comics, animation. In the Bachelor’s program, these
interactions take place in pluri-disciplinary workshops organized as clusters: Art, Narration and
Media. In the Master’s program, four programs are proposed: Art Practice, Critical Tools (Art and
Simultaneous Contexts), Narrative and Experimentation (Speculative Narration), Politics and
Experimentation in Graphic Design (Editorial Design, erg-edit, Politics of the Multiple / Practices of
Graphic Design and Scientific Complexity). Students also have the opportunity to familiarize
themselves with other practices through in-school internships, during workshops organized by the
teachers with external guests and open to multiple orientations, or through the use of various learning
sites (video editing room, super 8 lab, sound lab, print lab, and so on).

For more than 13 years, erg organises together with a partner institution in the Instituts St Luc, the
training of future art teachers who willl work in high schools and other art education centers.
erg also co-organised with the French speaking Universities in Belgium a practice based phd in arts
in the framework of the Ecole Doctorale 20
and is part of the Art et recherche platform which gathering all the art schools in the French speaking
Community to support research lead by artists.

What are the activities and experience of the organisation in the areas relevant for this project? What
are the skills and/or expertise of key persons involved in this project?

Since its creation in 1972, erg has defined itself as a research school where the activation of modes
and spaces of production enables students to learn while developing a practice. Regarding the fields
of arts and pedagogies erg can demonstrate a long experience since is creation in 1972. The art
education developed in the school has followed the changes in techniques, art practices, theory and
the societal needs. At the beginning of 2017, a group of teachers and students launched the
"Teaching to transgress" awareness project through organised in the school as an invitation to all the
community to discuss gender issues and intersectional representations in art education. These
urgent issues are usually only to be found in the periphery of official higher education programmes.
They are now raised inside the school by teachers and students lacking the formal spaces for
investigating these pedagogical practices. The school gathers competences in arts, technology,
anthropology, management, pedagogy, research.