Residency Daniel Arasse | Juliette Bessette

Juliette Bessette will be in residency at Villa Medici as part of the Daniel Arasse Fellowship, a scientific exchange programme between the École française de Rome and the Académie de France in Rome, intended for art history students in the process of completing their doctorate who wish to conduct research in Rome. There she will continue her research project in art history and architecture on the surrounding structures and the connections between Richard Buckminster Fuller and Carla Accardi.

This project brings together two creative initiatives in the form of environments on the edge of art, architecture and design: the geodesic structures of architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and the Tenda structures of artist Carla Accardi, which share characteristics of transparency, lightness and mobility. The first international event to give resonance to the geodesic dome, a structure developed by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1940s, took place in Italy, at the 1954 Milan Triennale, whose theme was “Life between Artifact and Nature: Design and the Environmental Challenge”. In 1967, the geodesic dome was once again honoured at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoletto. At the same time, Carla Accardi initiated, with Tenda (1965-1966), a work on temporary structures as part of a reflection on environmental art, the first of its kind in Italy. She created several environments of this type in Sicofoil (derived from plastic) or Perspex. The properties of these materials can be traced back to the history of sensibilities: Carla Accardi has said that these transparent structures exerted “a certain fascination” on her, representing “a symbolically different way of life.