For almost 25 years, PNCI has looked for ways to reinvent and rethink the modalities and practicalities of art education and artistic practice itself from the mixed legacy of counter-culture,
Situationist International,
French Theory,
Martin Kippenberger,
Walter Benjamin or the vernacular knowledge of the French South West.
PNCI - History of a nomadic workshop of the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts retraces the itinerary of the studio from Seville to Oaxaca, via Los Angeles, Figueres, Barcelona, New York, Brussels, Rome, Naples, Ibiza, Buenos Aires and the Pyrenees. It recounts a teaching experiment where students dwelled in travel and picked knowledge on the side of the road rather in classrooms. This book also features commissioned texts written by some of the studio's traveling companions (
Thomas Lawson, Pedro G. Romero, Ralph Rugoff) or heirs of its pedagogical and artistic principles (
Yann Chateigné Tytelman and
Lili Reynaud-Dewar). These authors share with PNCI's protagonists the ambition that artistic education, despite its increasing institutionalization, has to provide art students new conditions to think differently and to jettison accumulated traditions and inherited categories.
Michel Aphesbero and Danielle Colomine are artists and have created the 4taxis zine in 1978.
Jean Calens is teacher at the Bordeaux Fine Arts Academy.