COTA Art for Society

COTA Art for Society COTA Art for Society is a Paris based association initiating artistic and linguistic projects as a means social exchange.

COTA's activities : personalised language training and artistic creation, Erasmus+ partneships, e-learning tools.

01/09/2026

🟡”Printmaking is an art of revelation: at the moment of printing, both the technique and the work itself are revealed. Powerful images can be created with very limited means. It opens up a whole field of possibilities.”

Claire Poisson is a visual artist, printmaker and teacher. Trained in the craft of printmaking at École Estienne, she has developed a practice combining prints and installations. She pays particular attention to the qualities of materials, to the artisanal and experimental nature of printmaking, and to the exchanges that emerge through hands-on workshops. Her residencies and collaborations, both in France and abroad, often grow out of direct relationships with other artists and craftspeople.

Her installation work is based on collecting fragments and everyday objects — found in the city or in nature — which she assembles with minimal intervention. Without claiming an explicitly activist approach, her attention to objects, resources and what becomes of them reflects an ethical and ecological perspective.

Alongside her artistic practice, she leads numerous printmaking workshops for a wide range of participants, notably for the City of Nanterre and in museums. She introduces accessible techniques that allow everyone, regardless of age or previous experience, to discover the world of printed images and their own creative potential.

https://www.instagram.com/claire.poisson_

www.clairepoisson.com

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

Partners:

COTA Art for Society
Il Salone dei Rifiutati
Comparative Research Network



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

28/08/2026

🟡”My artistic practice consists in stirring up the social space in order to reawaken the political, by inventing a space within institutions that creates a poetic and critical distance from the representations imposed on their ‘inhabitants’, allowing another visual and textual narrative to emerge.”

Arnaud Théval is a visual artist whose work has, for more than thirty years, examined the representations, stereotypes and forms of confinement produced by society and institutions. He conducts long-term research in schools, hospitals, prisons and other public spaces. Through investigation, listening and a sustained presence developed alongside the people who live or work there, he seeks to bring to light the narratives and experiences that institutional structures often leave in the shadows.

Rather than taking the form of conventional art-making workshops, his practice creates spaces for research and dialogue. Photographs, texts, drawings, books, seminars and debates become the forms of a situated practice developed about, within and alongside each institution. His works shift perspectives, question hierarchies and enable people who are often reduced to a role or status to tell their stories differently.

https://www.instagram.com/arnaud_theval_/

https://www.arnaudtheval.com

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

Partners:

COTA Art for Society
Il Salone dei Rifiutati
Comparative Research Network



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

27/08/2026

🟡“Art making is often a solitary experience, but I think there are many practices that are focused on creative collaboration. I think this is a very future forward aspect of upcoming culture production.”

Rodney La Tourelle is a project-based artist frequently working with Louise Witthöft as Witthöft & LaTourelle
Their interdisciplinary practice engages infrastructure as an expressive tool, exploring the psycho-spatial conditions of communal experience. Their work often re-creates standard building elements in transformational materials, currently focusing on circular and sustainable processes such as geopolymer cement and recycled aggregates. By emphasizing the poetics of material history, their practice examines both the cultural and environmental impacts of sustainable forms of construction.

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

EU Partners: Comparative Research Network Il Salone dei Rifiutati COTA Art for Society



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

23/08/2026

🟡”Every object carries both an intimate story and an ecological one. By sharing them, we can question the ways we produce, consume and live, without making future generations bear the cost of the transition.”

Ali Zareghanatnowi is an Iranian filmmaker, author and producer, living in exile in France since 2019. Trained and active in cinema since his teenage years, he has directed numerous documentary, animated and fiction films, alongside work as a teacher and workshop facilitator. In France, he continues his work across film, writing, exhibitions and artistic transmission, particularly through video-editing workshops and collective projects developed with schools, festivals and arts organisations.

His current project, What We Carry, is a participatory documentary installation devoted to everyday objects that people keep throughout their lives and journeys. Starting from objects brought by people in exile, Ali aims to collect stories, images and sound recordings that reveal both their personal and material trajectories: their manufacture, the resources involved, circulation, use and eventual fate. Informed by his own experience of exile, the project brings together memory, migration, consumption and ecology, creating a space in which individual stories become a shared reflection on the ways we live.

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/alizareghanatnowi/

IMDb
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9186876/

Linktree — films, publications et autres liens professionnels
https://linktr.ee/cinemaali

YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/cinemaali

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

Partners:
COTA Art for Societyy
Il Salone dei Rifiutati
Comparative Research Network



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

20/08/2026

🟡”Drawing makes it possible to address very harsh realities without imposing the violence of photographs or words. But when I draw, I also work with light, shadow, silhouettes and depth.”

Najah Albukai is a Syrian artist, draughtsman, painter and printmaker, trained at the Fine Arts School in Damascus and later in France. A political refugee since 2015, he has developed a body of work informed by his experience of imprisonment in Syrian regime prisons. Through drawing, printmaking, ink and watercolour, he gives form to the traces of prison violence and war, without reducing his work to testimony: his research also explores light, colour, animals and the expressive possibilities of the image itself. Artist-in-residence at the Casa de Velázquez in 2021–2022, he continues a work of memory in which artistic rigour remains central.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najah_Albukai

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC6ZgQKTdPo

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

Partners:
COTA Art for Society
Il Salone dei Rifiutati
Comparative Research Network



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

19/08/2026

🟡”Bringing beauty into the street already creates an encounter and a form of social connection. The impact of an artwork is not always measurable: it may lie in a changed way of looking, or simply in making a place feel more alive.”

Joachim Romain is a photographer, visual artist and urban artist. From his studio at 6b in Saint-Denis, he collects discarded posters, printed fragments and overlooked materials from the city, which he layers, tears and transforms into collages, sculptural forms and installations. His work questions the accumulation of images, consumer society and the afterlife of materials, while bringing these forms back into public space. Through site-specific projects, including Coastal Commons in Malta (with DĂ©chets d’Arts), he also explores reuse and encounters with local actors, without separating these experiences from his commitment to artistic creation.

http://www.instagram.com/joachimromain

http://www.joachimromain.com

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

Partners:

COTA Art for Society

Il Salone dei Rifiutati

Comparative Research Network



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

15/08/2026

🟡”When we put tools in children’s hands, especially those of children who do not yet speak French fluently, they can express themselves in ways they have never been able to at school.”

Dadave is a self-taught sculptor and carpenter. For more than thirty years, he has created sculptures and assemblages from reclaimed materials, including old computer components, giving them a new life.

Alongside his artistic practice, he shares woodworking skills through workshops with children, young people changing direction and people experiencing precarious situations. He values making things together, learning through hands-on work and reusing materials. His journey also includes a collective project with refugees in the “Jungle” camp in Calais, where creating artworks became an opportunity for encounter, expression and a shared way of seeing.

https://www.instagram.com/dadave.atelier
https://www.dadave.fr

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

Partners:
COTA ART FOR SOCIETY
IL SALONE DEI RIFIUTATI
COMPRATIVE RESEARCH NETWORK



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe.

13/08/2026

🟡”When I open up a space for women to share and tell them, ‘I am here to listen to you,’ they are very happy. It makes a huge difference in the way they see themselves: they feel that their stories, knowledge and identity matter to the world.”

Shapla Singha is a full-time artist and lecturer at the University of Khulna. For several years, she has worked with women in the Sundarbans, a region deeply affected by climate disasters, erosion and displacement. Through embroidery, recycled textiles—including garments donated by women from the community—the collection of stories and references to local mythology, she makes their voices, memories and knowledge visible. Her artistic practice becomes a space for listening, transmission and recognition for communities that are too often unheard.

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu
EU Partners: COTA Art for Society Il Salone dei Rifiutati Comparative Research Network



This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe

12/08/2026

🟡”The connection between me, my works and the people who look at them is, for me, the most important thing. It is like a game of ping-pong: when someone tells me that they were moved by it, that they were able to enter another universe, I feel that I have succeeded in creating a connection.”

Sepideh Barazandehdoost is an Iranian visual artist based in Paris. Her expressive paintings combine textures, natural materials and found objects, which she sees as carrying stories and energy. A former founder of an art school in Iran, she advocates for an accessible artistic practice in which creating can become a time for focus, meditation and connection with oneself. For her, art fully comes to life when it opens a sensitive dialogue between the work and those who encounter it.

https://www.instagram.com/sepideh.barazandehdost/

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

EU Partners: COTA Art for Society Il Salone dei Rifiutati Comparative Research Network







This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe

11/08/2026

🟡”Sharing part of one’s life and story is motivating. I feel that the people I work with gain confidence: they dare more and are less afraid of making mistakes. ”

Amandine Sar, a French-as-a-foreign-language and literacy teacher at La CroisĂ©e des Langues, supports her learners in creating a collective book of life stories. Here, writing becomes a way to take one’s place, make one’s story heard, and value mother tongues through audio recordings accessible via QR codes. Her project entitles ‟Écrire et crĂ©er en famille” (Writing and Creating as a Family) will take the form of a book that will be presented at the partner library and shared with local associations: a meaningful way to turn individual journeys into a visible, collective work that builds confidence.



https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100084412597252

Follow us at: https://circularmuseum.eu

EU Partners:
Comparative Research Network COTA Art for Society Il Salone dei Rifiutati








This post is part of the EU COM E research, exploring how art can foster community engagement, sustainability, and social inclusion across Europe

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