Cocoon project comes to Paris

The Cocoon project, an international artwork by New York artist Kate Browne, works with communities with strong and often turbulent histories of immigration. After Mexico City, Mississippi and New York's South Bronx, Browne has set up shop in Paris ’s most multi-ethnic neighbourhood, the Goutte d’Or.

The cocoon built in Jackson, Mississippi Eric Etheridge

Over the years this working-class area in north Paris has welcomed Europeans, north Africans and now, increasingly, people from sub-Saharan Africa.

The live alongside one another but don’t necessarily mix.

Browne is welcoming everyone - whatever their faith, sexuality, age or social class - to join in workshops where they make small cocoons out of their own or locally-sourced materials.

“Intimate and vivid expressions of the participants’ individual visions - or wishes and prayers - for their pasts, presents, and futures,” she says.

The cocoons, along with recordings of participants’ stories will be part of a large cocoon sculpture, to be revealed at the Nuit Blanche contemporary art festival on 4 October 2014.

Follow the project on Facebook.

Kate Browne (L) helps local people from La Goutte d’Or make their cocoons Alison Hird