Françoise Schein, a human rights artist

The work of Françoise Schein, artist, architect and urban planner, is graphic yet monumental. Since 1989, she has been inscribing human rights on the walls of our urban centres: the arches of underground stations, walls in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, the forecourts or facades of cultural centres, from old Europe to the New World with a detour to the Middle East. As a cartographer, her work plays with boundaries and countries and anchors populations in their history.

Writing is central to her work: texts of charters of rights read from afar, place names on maps as benchmarks for the traveller-reader, not forgetting the aphorisms dispersed in a poetic exhalation.

Her participatory methodology directly involves local residents in the production of her works, making Françoise Schein a unique personality with one foot in the world of art and architecture and the other that of philosophy and human rights.

The book is divided into three parts: the series of urban works; the series of participatory works her and personal research, drawings, notebooks or inspirations which the artist herself calls a "research laboratory".