The biannual project is one way which we get you prepared to take a more active role during a walk. It is also an opportunity for exchange beyond the measure of our time together. You come to this page to see our collective progress and watch your individual contribution grow. Any of you can add a thread on social media for a more significant opportunity to impact the course of the project.

 

This spring we will give local youth our attention.

 

We see all kinds of people wherever we go in the world, but there is something special about the French Jeunesse Locale. This is an attempt on our part to be dispassionate and withhold labels. It is an attempt to empower ourselves to experience a place through the minds of its inhabitants. We want to discuss milestones in the development of those minds to understand our similarities and differences. This is also an attempt to be original and make our own judgments instead of accepting the signifiers that are attributed to youth culture by those involved in selling things. We are not looking for the youth culture of breaking-and-entering skate parks, flaunting unmanageable hair and urban wear, broken teeth and tattoos and video games. We are not necessarily talking about segmenting local youth into groups with recognizable identities. We are not promoting sunshine to a cold world denizen.

 

Jeunesse Locale is part caricature: the kids at the summer fête du village eating sausages and playing a passionate game of foosball. It is part fiction: a bored group gathered at the gates, one falling in love, another rejecting the possibility of love. And it is also part ultra-reality: the privileged, the poor and the thieves, all with their own agendas, some unable to see themselves though they manage to talk to themselves all day in technology speak.

 

Use the lens of a working creative to interact with the city. 

 

This project has yet to be defined by any active participants and we acknowledge that the direction currently presented is our own. The crux of this process is to trust something will emerge. We have done projects in the past which benefit from being created in public. They may have been skewed by using a process which assumed what it set out to prove. Example: Concrete. A play on fixed material and using language to co-opt the space where we live. We spent 40 days laying on the concrete sidewalks and streets of San Francisco between five minutes and an hour and then writing our reactions.

Things work in two ways: you can make them work or let them work. Jeunesse Locale is about finding the project that is important to us, researching the field, incubating the work and then cultivating it. Yes, Moontown.