The first phase of the Attitudes Mineures project is taking place at the private agricultural teaching school Saint-Joseph, located in Les Fontenelles in the Haut-Doubs, France, during the harsh winter, which makes it difficult to practice outdoors. The village is built along a departmental road that branches off into a network of streets and paths leading to the Franche-Comté houses, old farmhouses and other private dwellings. The layout is reduced to its simplest expression, signage and transport; instead of a public square, fields. This is why Mathieu Tremblin proposes to shift the focus of his work with high school students around the notion of rurbanity rather than on urbanity itself.

The CowParade or VAch’Art serves as a starting point for the first proposal. Originally conceived by the Swiss artistic director Walter Knapp in 1998, then taken over by the American businessman Peter Hanig in 1999 and since then shown in some thirty cities around the world, the “Cowparade” is an exhibition in which a herd of cow sculptures in fibreglass is personalised by local artists and fashion designers and then installed in the city center streets.

Cow Demonstration is organized as a revival, which puts the issues in a rural situation, starting from a pre-existing visual element: the wooden cow silhouettes used for the decorations of agricultural comices serve as a lever to question rurality. Mathieu Tremblin and the SAPAT and STAV students, with the help of the school’s technical agent, created a series of 10 cows with the brown spot pattern of the Montbéliardes cows on one side and a graphic motif of the order of the report, the claim or the slogan on the other.