“There is no capitalism involved in what I do. So my work is often not for sale,” says artist Françoise Schein, in a warm and amiable tone with a smile that makes her so approachable. “I’ve done a lot of projects, one after the other. They have always emerged, and you don’t know why and how. It all depends.”
Hers is a 40-year career that has seized upon the crucial moments in history and delivered large-scale urban works about the dissemination of human rights – from the sidewalks in New York’s SoHo district, to the subway in Paris and the favelas in Brazil. Her artworks can’t be hung on the walls of museums or galleries, but more people go past them every day than stand in front of the Mona-Lisa. All her projects have become local landmarks in numerous cities around the world.
Using writing, cartography, drawings and charts, Schein has dug deep into inequality and the imbalances of power by bringing back people’s consciousness of their basic rights. Using the text of the Declaration of Human Rights or the artworks of ordinary people as protagonists, the public art she creates is a constant reminder of, as she asserts, the fundamental base of democracy “for the common good and well being of all people.”
At age 71, Schein continues to burst with original ideas and enthusiasm for the public space. This October she will create, together with her nonprofit INSCRIRE and the nonprofit INTERRA, a big banquet placed in the “dining room” of Schein’s imaginary house, drawn in white lines on the ground of Place Xavier Neujean, in a mostly migrant-populated neighborhood in the city of Liège, Belgium. The installation that she has called “Je vous invite à la maison” (in English, “I invite you to my house”) will transform the square into a welcoming ephemeral house.
“We’re making a big party with a great deal of fanfare, music and food trucks. The whole point is to create bonds among people, and together produce a big art piece – a tablecloth – where each person will paint something about their city reflecting the desire of many migrant people to find a home,” explains Schein.
In Liège, Schein will also have a major exhibition showing her artistic trajectory that she says is not yet known to the public. Her assertion is arresting given her talent and reach, but she has a point: how many of us may have passed by her works and never considered or knew who created it? “Talking about myself is not in my DNA,” she smiles, but finally some of us have gotten the message that Françoise Schein deserves our fullest attention. In 2016, she was elected a Member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Arts et des Lettres de Belgique.
Françoise Schein meets me over Zoom. Our conversation is filled with her anecdotes and life experiences, affording many glimpses into her artistic path and how her creative ideas come to fruition through meaningful and casual encounters.
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Born in Belgium in 1953, to a mother working for the Red Cross and an engineer father, Schein graduated in La Cambre school of Architecture in Brussels. But it was in New York where she had finally found her unique way into art.
Schein eventually moved to New York to study Urban Design at Columbia University, and during that program she was interested in the dynamics of the Bronx at that time: “In the ‘80s it was a rundown neighborhood with piles of bricks and broken houses everywhere. I studied that one specific area in the Bronx and realized that the land was owned by very wealthy downtown Wall Street companies that were buying these random properties and letting them fall apart.”
One of Schein’s classmates had a big motorcycle and took her regularly to talk to the locals in the Bronx; she felt it was like a war zone with armed people on the streets. “Once the whole area starts running down, it becomes worse and worse,” she observes. But she realized that there were two distinct points of the neighborhood which were still up and running – and they were around the subway stops. “There was still a grocery store, some houses, people still had some things around them. The further out you were from the subway stops, the more rundown it was,” Schein remembers.
“I realized if New York City is a human being with veins, the subway itself was a major system for the entire city that connected and kept the body alive. And this is true for any city in the world,” she says. This is why Schein built her homage to the subway in SoHo in 1985 that would define her career.
While contemporaneous artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were immersed in the graffiti subculture in SoHo, Schein engraved, in stainless steel concrete and lights, Subway Map Floating on a Sidewalk of 110 Greene street.
From then on, the conceptual space of the subway turned out to be more interesting for Schein to explore. As an urbanist and an architect, she began analyzing city maps and networks. In 1989, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Schein used her research to suggest an artwork for the Concorde Subway station in Paris, the historical background of which felt “very heavy” on the map. Schein took the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen written in 1789, and questioned how to make a text exist while at the same time disappear to the human eye. “I finally realized that if I just take out the spaces and punctuation between the words, it does the job,” she smiles.
At first glance, for the thousands of commuters that pass through that station every day, the 44,000 letters of the text of the Declaration of Human Rights (one in each tile on the wall) feel randomly placed. And that’s intentional. But for the passengers who wait for the subway and have a little time to kill, if they read closely, most of them realize that the letters do indeed have a meaning.
Settled in Paris, Schein made the Parvis de Saint-Gilles subway station in Brussels in 1992 — devoted to the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet in a different format or code. This time Schein covered the walls in blue tiles with letters in white; in between the texts, white lines that represent the borders of the European countries, “expressing what Europe was all about.”
The year 1992 was a pivotal year in the development of the European Community but it was also when Arafat and Rabin began to talk to each other about a solution for Israel and Palestine. Schein had lots of extra adhesive labels from the project in Brussel that she didn’t use. “And I asked myself, what can I do with that in the world that would be useful and would make sense?” She managed to get the French embassy to pay for her plane tickets, and had the tiles sent and gifted by the Belgium subway system to Israel. “We had no money for this, it was just wild. But they sent it all to Haifa, and the mayor paid for all the making on the wall of the Jewish Arab Cultural Center, on Mount Carmel.”
The zig-zag stripe on that wall represents the Green Line drawn in the resolution that divided Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in 1948. Schein wrote “borders are the scars of history” on the wall, from the poem Rain on Borders by French writer Michel Butor (translated into Arabic by poet Emile Habbibi and into Hebrew by writer Yehuda Lancry). The wall, still standing, has been dedicated to peace.
Three years later Schein found herself taking part in a discussion at the UNESCO in Paris, and had the opportunity to meet UN secretary-general at that time, Kofi Annan. Proudly she showed him how she was working on the dissemination of human rights, and to her surprise he said: “You know, Françoise, it’s very interesting to put the Declaration of Human Rights in the subway in Paris or Brussels, and make it readable for people, because most people don’t know about their basic human rights. But you know what? In Africa, they don’t even know how to read. So think about that. Make that text readable and teach the people!”
Meanwhile, Schein was about to adopt her daughter in Brazil. When she brought her to Paris, Schein immediately realized that she would need to take her daughter to Brazil at least once a year to maintain contact with her siblings and her roots. But it was a great challenge for Schein to communicate with her daughter’s biological family due to their lack of education.The following year, Schein took the idea of educating people in the favelas on human rights, and ran with it, with the support of the judge, Siro Darlan who had been in charge of her daughter’s adoption.
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In 1997, Schein formally founded the Association INSCRIRE that set into motion collaborations with schools in the favelas. Schein began to communicate directly with people, “one at a time, place after place,” and create artworks in the public realm produced with the active participation of pupils. A skin-colored girl from one of the schools announced: “I drew about Article 5 because men hitting women is ugly in society. To see a man hitting a woman is not good, isn’t it? Because there are already so many prejudices about black men, imagine a man hitting a woman, it is not good.”
“It is a big thing to say that our work with youngsters has influenced them in their adult lives, but it has certainly aroused in them a certain consciousness of the rights they have,” says Schein.
Starting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and expanding the concept to other cities all over the world, Schein has worked with youngsters on the human rights concepts through their participation in public art-making that has a larger social purpose. I ask Schein why it’s so important to teach kids human rights, and she uses a comparison to the notion of entropy. “If you don’t do anything to a house, that house will collapse after ten years by itself. If you keep maintaining the knowledge and presence of human rights, it would prevent the erosion of our democratic values,” says Schein.
Schein has combined her time at the nonprofit INSCRIRE with her own artwork that we can unexpectedly come across in subway stations, at parks, and on walls in cities around the world. She continues to juxtapose the Declaration of Human Rights’ text with images, philosophical and literary texts and cartographies of the local culture and history. For most of her works, Schein collaborates with sociologists, educators, philosophers, and intellectuals from other disciplines that she finds “fascinating.” “I found it way more interesting to mix things and to give opportunity also to other people to actually enter and be part of my work.”
Schein’s work deepens into cities’ psyche. More recently, Schein and her team have been working for three years in Molenbeek, one of the neighborhoods of the Brussels-Capital Region, where the jihadists who killed people in the Bataclan theater massacre in Paris in 2015 came from. Its population is mostly of Arab descent from North Africa, and more recently refugees from Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Romania. The team at INSCRIRE offered more than 100 kids to paint the story of their lives, and especially of leaving their homes behind and the time it took them with their families to finally reach Brussels.
Schein made these stories into a huge art piece that sits in the main public plaza of Molenbeek, all with the support of the new museum Kanal-Centre Pompidou in Brussels. “These kids have appreciated the work in such an immense way that the director of the school decided to make a whole department of art in her school,” says Schein.
“The whole process of telling the stories, crying sometimes, had a healing effect for the youngsters and helped them at least in part to overcome the pain and the sadness, and be resilient. At the same time, expressing things gave them a sense of pride. I love to give kids confidence, see them happy, becoming proud, changing, flourishing. That to me is ten times more important than saying I’m the great, I’m the greatest,” Schein says.
“So what is an artist?” poses Schein rhetorically. “They are all these great people, let’s say it: mainly men who have these fantastic ideas and talents. But it was not always like that. We don’t really know who built the Parthenon in Greece or the Pyramids in Egypt.” Whoever they were, we can probably agree that they are the most public, yet unknown urban artists.
