Villa Medici Fellow’s annual exhibition Curator: Saverio Verini Exhibition from 10 June to 6 August 2023 Performance, talks, concerts programming on 10 June 2023
With the participation of: Begoña Zubero Apodaca, Maria Grazia D’Amelio, Séverine Ballon, Steve City, Sandro Compagnon, Ganavya Doraiswamy, Azzurra Fiume, Bianca Friscelli, Perry Gits, Kyara, Lorenzo Di Marzo, Geoffroy Mathieu, Lana Milan, Augustin Muller, Flavio Musillo, Maxime Hortense Pascal, Martin Planchaud, Virgile Pellerin, Amandine Pudlo, Rémy Reber, Peter Sellars, Jean-Étienne Sotty, Davide Stanzione, Studio T&D, Tom & Delhia, Rajna Swaminathan, Benjamin Tholozan, Pauline Von Aesch, Spanish Academy in Rome
The title of the exhibition Una linea storta tesa is intended to evoke the path of the residency: a trajectory that includes fixed points and rethinks, a thread that is constantly alive, tense, agitated. During the time spent in residence, the fellows’ research takes unexpected paths, proceeding through detours, encounters, unexpected events and surprises that testify to the vitality of this experience. The exhibition, therefore, does not take the form of a simple restitution of the research projects presented at the beginning of the residency, but becomes an opportunity to show the path taken by the fellows during their stay in Rome; not a point of arrival, but a momentary passage, experienced amidst oscillations and surprising discoveries. The title suggests a paradoxical image, difficult to visualise, that renders the contradictions of the residency, while also attempting to reflect the complexity of the proposals that animate the exhibition itinerary.
A constellation of interventions that, among art installations, performances, literature, historical research, video, photography and music, highlights the different directions taken by the group of fellows: from the interest in the landscape and its transformations to feminist perspectives, from the affective and historical potential of objects to the relationship with Rome and the spaces of Villa Medici, which often serve as a backdrop to the fellows’ creations. These are some of the themes that emerge from the various proposals in the exhibition, presented according to a rhythm that highlights affinities and divergences between the interventions.
Throughout the exhibition, performances and activations of works will be proposed by the residents of Villa Medici in the exhibition rooms: readings, happenings, performances.
Saturday, June 10: Performance programming
On Saturday 10 June from 4pm to 9pm, Villa Medici will be the setting for a rich programme of readings, lectures, performances and concerts, which further emphasise the multidisciplinary nature of the fellows’ proposals. Performances are subject to availability.
Tuesday, June 20: Sivan Eldar’s residency restitution
On Tuesday 20 June at 6pm, fellow Sivan Eldar will be holding a public presentation and discussion of her residency work in the Michel Piccoli screening room at Villa Medici.
Sivan Eldar, accompanied by vocalist and improviser Ganavya Doraiswamy, director Peter Sellars, Mrudangam artist Rajna Swaminthan, cellist Séverine Ballon and computer music producer Augustin Muller, will be giving a preview of her opera in development, Nine Jewelled Deer.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that brings together unpublished contributions from authors who question, narrate and put into perspective the work of the fellows in a fruitful dialogue around their artistic practices.
The authors associated with the publication: Dolores Bakela, Gorge Bataille (Elodie Petit), François Bon, Vittoria Bonifati, Fatma Cheffi, Sonia D’alto, Giulia Fiocca, Géraldine Gourbe, Joan Grandjean, Nicolas Mathieu, Gaëlle Obiégly, Francesca Pietropaolo, Jean-Luc Plouviet, Alix Prada, Lorenzo Romito, Simon(e) van Sarloos.
The Villa Medici fellows, 2022-2023
Samir Amarouch, musical composition
Born in France in 1991, Samir Amarouch is a composer and guitarist. He studied guitar at the Conservatoire de Boulogne-Billancourt as well as Musicology at the Sorbonne. In 2015 he was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris.
The transposition of sounds from the natural, urban and technological environment is one of the major sources of his compositional work. Inspired by structuralist, minimalist and spectral currents, as well as by traditional oriental and electronic music, his latest works deal with the perception of time and rhythm and the ambiguity between timbre and harmony.
Winner of several international prizes, including the Composition Prize of the Ernst Von Siemens Foundation in 2020, his music has been performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre National de France, the Ensemble Modern, and the Ensemble InterContemporain.
His research project at Villa Medici is dedicated to the creation of a cycle of works whose instrumentation is derived from his piece Electronica-B minor crush, a composition for 21 musicians, with particular emphasis on microtonal accordions, the harpsichord and the electric guitar. Acceleration, deceleration, as well as pulse inflections, groove, rhythmic microvariations and sensations are at the heart of this work, which will be associated with choreographic research in collaboration with a dancer-choreographer, in order to create a hybrid work of music and movement.
Mounir Ayache, visual arts
Born in 1991, the French-Moroccan artist Mounir Ayache invites us to rethink our view of the political and social realities of the Arab world through his technological creations.
By using the codes of science fiction to which he blends family stories and the imaginary reappropriation of Arab experiences and identities, he is part of the unofficial trend of Arab Futurism, influenced by the Afrofuturism of the 1990s, which is inspired by fiction to propose alternative narratives. Mounir Ayache mimics the representations of the Other and the Stranger in Western fiction, and uses new technologies to produce and transmit his ideas, blurring the boundaries between contemporary art and entertainment.
His residency project revolves around the character of Hassan al-Wazzan (1494-1555) who became Johannes Leo de Medicis under Pope Leo X, known as “Leo Africanus”, the main character of the novel bearing his name written by Amin Maalouf in 1986. In 1525, at the request of the Pope, he wrote “La Cosmographia de Affrica”, which was to serve as a reference for describing sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, and which would nourish the European imagination, for whom this region was unknown.
Taking the 1525 manuscript as a starting point, his writing work consists of creating a science-fiction story set in the year 2500, in which the main character, inspired by Hassan al-Wazzan, recounts the exchanges between Africa and Europe, summoning up fictional geopolitical and ecological issues connected with the city of Rome. This story will result in the production of a series of sculptures activating, by means of an augmented reality device, digital content that will be superimposed on reality.
Yasmina Benabderrahmane, photography
Yasmina Benabderrahmane graduated from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 2009 and from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains de Tourcoing in 2015. She works with film and silver photography in an experimental way.
Her instinctive artistic practice lies halfway between documentary and film diary, and mainly takes the form of multimedia installations. She collects and probes the visible world and the people she loves and who surround her. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions and is included in both private and public collections. In 2018 she received the Solveig-Anspach Prize and was awarded the Revelation in Photography – Laureate of the LE BAL Prize for Young Creation 2019 with the ADAGP. In 2021 she won the national photographic commission “Regards du Grand Paris – Année 6” (CNAP – Ateliers Médicis).
Her research project is based on a discovery with her aunt, a few years ago, of a thirty-year archive of slide photographs donated by Dominican nuns. She learnt that they will be forced out of their convent in Paris. And also that the nuns in the Vatican are protesting against their working conditions. That there are even some who have become “hospitalists” and are socially committed. A ninth-century legend tells us that the popess Joan became a papal nun by pretending to be a man, and that her pretence was revealed when she gave birth in public during her sacrament.
For Yasmina Benabderrahmane, behind all of this lies the idea that a woman is worth less than a man, that a priest is everything, and a nun nothing. She perceives transvestism primarily as an attempt to transgress gender and the imposed order. These questions of masquerade and revelation lead her to reflect on the carnival tradition in the access to the divine. To carry out the residency project “CARNE VALE, lotta lavora come un fascista”, she will follow a community to better uncover minorities, and will seek to unveil the light.
Hortense de Corneillan, heritage restoration
Born in 1980 in Paris, Hortense de Corneillan is a heritage restorer, specialising in ceramic and glass materials. She has a degree in art history, museology (École du Louvre) and conservation-restoration (Institut national du patrimoine) and has been living in Switzerland since 2008.
After 11 years working for a museum, she now works as a freelancer. She works for Swiss and European institutions in the fields of archaeology and the decorative arts.
An important part of her activity is devoted to teaching. She is a lecturer at the Haute École Arc Conservation-restauration (HE-Arc CR, Neuchâtel) where she also coordinates further training for professionals in the field of conservation.
Her residency at Villa Medici is devoted to the restoration of ancient vases found in Etruria in the 19th century. By considering these modifications as cultural markers, testimony to a changing relationship with the ancient object, she would like to question their progressive disappearance during modern conservation campaigns. At the same time, she is reflecting on the possibilities of mediation around the restored vases. How can the public be made to understand the intimate and eventful history of such heritage objects?
Lorraine de Sagazan, staging
In parallel to her training as an actress, Lorraine de Sagazan studied philosophy. In order to train for staging, she moved to Berlin in 2014 to assist Thomas Ostermeier. Upon her return, she worked on adaptations of repertoire texts: Demons by Lars Noren, Puphejmo by Henrik Ibsen and L’Absence de père by Anton Tchekhov presented at the Nuits de Fourvière, the Centquatre and the MC93.
In 2020, she began a new cycle of work exploring the way in which fiction can respond to reality. This research gave rise to two first shows, La Vie invisible and Un sacre, created at the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris and at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis, where she is an associate artist. Her diverse projects, at the crossroads of performance, the performing arts and the visual arts, have been exported both abroad and throughout France.
Her research project at Villa Medici focuses on contemporary justice and more particularly on little-known and marginal alternatives such as restorative justice. As usual, it is written through immersion and gives rise to the development of a show-performance that questions the way in which art can be part of a restorative approach by inventing a ritual of justice through theatre.
The project unfolds in a constellation of proposals, including a film and installations in the public space in conjunction with other Villa Medici artists, with the ambition of multiplying the creation of utopian and imaginary legal spaces with the original force of action.
Dorothée Dupuis, curating
Born in 1980s Paris, Dorothée Dupuis is a curator, art critic and editor of contemporary art. Her practice focuses on the intersection between art and politics, seen from a transfeminist, post-Marxist, decolonial and anti-racist perspective.
Since 2013, she has been the director and founder of the magazine Terremoto and the publishing house Temblores Publicaciones, based in Mexico City. Before her move to Mexico in 2012, she was director of the contemporary art and residency centre Triangle-Astérides in Marseille, from 2007 to 2012, and assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou from 2005 to 2007. Since 2012, Dorothée Dupuis has been an independent curator and writes about Art in the Americas in Terremoto and in other international publications.
Her research project at Villa Medici is entitled “REBEL PERSPECTIVES. The feminist curatorial exercise in institutions in the present time in the light of Italian feminism of the 1970s”. Since 2019, Dorothée Dupuis has been pursuing a phase of theoretical research and writing on a curatorial format that she has been practicing since the beginning of her curatorial career: exhibiting women artists, seen from the field of curatorial studies.This research is an immersion in the project that has animated feminists in the Western art world since the 1970s, according to which there is a debt to women artists, which the exhibition of women artists could somehow “pay“. At Villa Medici, she wishes to use the legacy of Italian feminism of the 1970s revisited in our contemporary era as the theoretical, affective and conceptual framework to push forward the writing of the book Payer la dette : l’exposition d’artistes femmes comme provocation.
François Durif, literature
Born in 1968 in Clermont-Ferrand, François Durif is a writer and artist. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, his work never ceases to question the status of the contemporary artist and their prerogatives.
During his first exhibitions, he alternated between being an interior decorator and a plasterer-painter, thus developing an art of discretion. Each time, he acts over time, records his actions in situ and produces a text on his progress.
Following a skills assessment, he left the world of art and became a funeral assistant and master of ceremonies in the Parisian funeral agency L’Autre Rive (2005-2008). Twelve years later, he looks back on this unique experience in his first story, Vide sanitaire, published by Verticales in October 2021. He is also keen to address the reader with the same frankness as during his performances in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
It is in this recovered energy that he conceived his writing project at Villa Medici. He took the word “confetti” as an object, investigating this curious projectile and its successive moults: first of plaster – Italian confetti -, then of paper – at the time known as Parisian confetti. At the same time as writing, he is converting part of his archives into confetti – a way of materialising the luxury of time offered by this localised utopia that is Villa Medici. For him, writing, as much as making confetti, is a manual activity that implies knowing how to cut – how to offset.
Sivan Eldar, musical composition
Born in 1985 in Tel Aviv, composer Sivan Eldar holds a PhD in composition from UC Berkeley and then joined IRCAM in Paris to follow the Cursus in Composition and Computer Music (2017).
Her music, published by Éditions Durand, is described as “meditative and captivating” (L’Humanité), “of great refinement” (ResMusica) and “with a unique sensitivity to drama” (Diapason).
Her most recent creations include Like Flesh (Operas of Lille, Montpellier, Lorraine, Antwerp), After Arethusa (Venice Biennale, Louvre Auditorium), Una Mujer Derramada (Théâtre du Châtelet), Heave (Centre Pompidou, Opéra de Marseille, November Musique) and Solicitations (Philharmonie Luxembourg, Ultraschall Berlin, Festival Présences, Wien Modern). She recently won the Fedora Opera 2021 prize, and has been a resident at the Villa Albertine, the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo, Civitella Ranieri, Singer-Polignac, Royaumont and Fulbright foundations.
In January 2022, she completed her first opera Like Flesh, the culmination of four years of research into a new hybrid musical language. Her year as a fellow at Villa Medici marks a unique moment of artistic reflection and will be dedicated to a new project: an oratorio for 2024 where the theme of ritual plays a central role. The oratorio represents a juxtaposition of two seminal stories, the radical Vimalakirti sutra and the story of the legendary Carnatic musician Seetha Doraiswamy. This is a collaboration with two distinct artistic voices: the director Peter Sellars and the Indian Carnatic singer Ganavya Doraiswamy, for the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence.
Marion Grébert, art history
Marion Grébert is a former student of the École normale supérieure de Lyon, from the arts department and the comparative literature section. After becoming a doctor in art history, she published a first essay in October 2022, Traverser l’invisible. Énigmes figuratives de Francesca Woodman et Vivian Maier, published by l’Atelier contemporain in Strasbourg. The book received the André Malraux Prize 2022.
Her career is characterised by a combination of academic and theoretical training and practical training. Throughout her thesis from 2014 to 2019, she carried out several professional experiences (lecturer in art history at Paris-IV-Sorbonne Universities from 2014 to 2017, intern-assistant in photographic conservation at the Musée d’Orsay in 2014 and at MoMA in New York in 2017). After obtaining her doctorate, she is pursuing her research through post-doctoral fellowships: the Balzan Foundation (Switzerland) in partnership with Paris-III-Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2019-2020 and the Terra Foundation for American Art (United States) in partnership with the INHA (Paris) in 2021-2022. Marion Grébert is also a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2015). Photography remains at the centre of her approach, in the tradition of writer-photographers.
At Villa Medici, she wrote a second essay on the flower, considered as a figurative motif as well as a cultural object through history or archaeobotany. She traces a path from the gardens and frescoes of the Villas of the Roman Empire to post-war art in the twentieth century, particularly in the literary and cinematographic work of Pasolini, and focusing on the pivotal period of the Pre-Renaissance. The flower allows him to propose a certain history of Italian and European modernity, both artistic and political and economic, from a visual anthropological perspective.
This work is complemented by the production of a series of photographs in the spaces of the Villa, partly in collaboration with Pauline Von Aesch. These images will be presented at the end of the fellows’ residency.
Bocar Niang, visual arts
Bocar Niang was born a griot from a family of griots on 8 June 1987 in Tambacounda, Senegal. He holds a Master’s degree in arts and culture from the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar and from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. He is currently developing a thesis on research and artistic creation within the RADIAN doctoral programme.
Founder of the Musée griot in Senegal and its branches in France, he is also artistic director of the Tamba Jeunes Talents Festival in Senegal since 2008 and of the Nekkalante Festival in France since 2018.
His multidisciplinary work combines orality, installation, writing, sculpture, film, video and music. It has been presented, among others, at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Ricard, Biennale de Dakar, Biennale de Cenon, Ygrec-Ensapc, Laboratoires d’Aubervillers and the Musée Théodore Monod in Dakar.
The project carried out at the Villa Medici is articulated in two parts: on the one hand, the production of narratives and oral/sound performances aiming to develop the narratives of objects and works and to strengthen the links between individuals, mobilities, and their contexts and territories. These narratives take place through multilingual readings, podcasts, declamations of writings and the creation of sound works on the collections, landscapes or legends of the Villa Medici and the city of Rome. On the other hand, the creation of a series of sculptures entitled Babyfoot, composed of 44 drawings and models of individuals, whose characters come from different countries of the world.
Lasseindra Ninja, choreography
Lasseindra Ninja is a dancer and choreographer who has been based in Paris for over ten years.
Trained in France and the United States, she has developed her artistic production by organising large-scale balls, choreographic creations and performances, both solo and in partnership with other artists.
In her work, she is interested in the identities and spaces that exist between the real and the virtual, from the stage to the screen and back again: when and under what conditions movement can be performed, as well as how it is perceived and judged. Her work is based on pan-African and transatlantic perspectives within a contemporary reflection on the history of bodies, the traces and reminiscences of collective dance experiences.
A pioneer of the Ballroom Scene in Europe, she founded the Eurasian chapter of the International & Iconic House of Ninja. Recognised by the title of Legend in the international ballroom community, she now explores the fields of contemporary creation, musical composition and digital arts (photo and video) within prestigious institutions such as the Centre National de la Danse or the Ballet National de Marseille.
The choreographic project which Lasseindra Ninja carried out for her residency at Villa Medici is inspired by ballroom culture and is situated at the crossroads of digital art (photo, video and 3D animation) and live performance (dance, theatre and performance). The theme of this piece is the notion of fair play as it questions and critiques the ability to judge within and outside the communal paradigm, a palimpsest of transformative and performative critical experience.This creation is a piece lasting approximately one hour, for eight to ten dancers from the international Ballroom Scene. The live dance performance is complemented by multimedia projections that enhance the powerful choreographic language of voguing: dramaturgical elements necessary to make the transgressive narrative that inhabits the choreographer explicit.
Liv Schulman, visual arts
Born in 1985, Liv Schulman grew up in Buenos Aires, where she attended public school. Fascinated by television, the arrival of cable in 1990 and the financial crash of 2001 are among the most striking moments of her life. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, she has lived in France since 2015.
Liv Schulman’s work takes the form of filmed fictions, TV series, readings-performances and novel writing. The narratives at the core of her work deal with the role of subjectivity in the political space and the difficulty of giving it credit. In this way, a real telenovela is shown on television as if in a museum. In her approach, creating means directly experiencing an environment, a system, a subject.
She has exhibited her work at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris, the CAC La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Crac Alsace, the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Austria, the Ricard Foundation in Paris, the SMK in Copenhagen, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska. She has benefited from the ADAGP grant, the sponsorship of the Fondation des Artistes, the DAAD residency programme in Germany, and was awarded the Ricard prize in 2018.
Liv Schulman wishes to conduct research at Villa Medici on Luigi Pirandello’s anti-theatre and its relationship with the affects of his wife Maria Antonietta Portulano’s insanity. Considering that Pirandello’s work is strongly influenced by what happened to his wife, she would like to propose an approach to this research linked to institutional psychotherapy.
Her project “Anti-théâtre, anti-psychiatrie, psychothérapie institutionnelle et un Opéra-T-shirt dans la Rome de Pirandello” consists of carrying out a dramaturgical work around and in the Rome of Portulano-Pirandello, using the city as a theatrical or cinematographic stage. In this setting, an opera-film unfolds in which anonymous tourists wander around the city. They move around wearing t-shirts with axioms, creating a choreography of metalanguage.
Anna Solal, visual arts
Anna Solal was born in 1988 in Dreux. She lives and works in Paris.
She belongs to a new generation of artists distinguished by a predilection for the “handmade”, for the non-hierarchical crossing of processes borrowed from art and craft. Her creations are made from discarded objects that she collects during her wanderings. She uses them to create aerial motifs, such as birds and kites. Starkly figurative, this pop iconography, both anxious and moving, highlights the isolation of the individual and a form of abstraction through which they navigate. Anna Solal has put on exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the CAC Passerelle in Brest, the Musée des abattoirs in Toulouse, and Interstate Projects (New York).
At Villa Medici, she is working on a project entitled “Empire défaillant”, which consists of a series of sculptural paintings composed of collages incorporating drawing and photography. The theme of this project is the human entity as defined by its inter-human relationships and its link to the natural environment. It will take Ancient Rome, one-time world dominator, Fascist Rome, and today’s Rome with its mass tourism, as its temporal framework. The embodiment of this collective will be ensured by an organic and symbolic work around paper and textile. A text written by Olivier Prada will accompany this plastic project: the story of a donkey reincarnated as a tear, travelling through a devastated Europe. If the notion of collapse is present with the ecological and imperial disasters, then new forms of life emerge, and the notion of a miracle is born – a miracle that will or will not take place.
Sarah Vanuxem, theories
After studying law and philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Sarah Vanuxem defended a thesis entitled Des choses saisies par la propriété (preface by Th. Revet, Institut de Recherches Juridiques de la Sorbonne, 2012).
She has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the Université Côte d’Azur since 2012. Her research lies at the crossroads of property law and environmental law, with forays into environmental philosophy, anthropology of nature and legal history.
Together with C. Guibet-Lafaye, she co-edited the book Repenser la propriété, un essai de politique écologique (Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2015), wrote various articles and authored two essays: La propriété de la terre (Wildproject, 2018) and Des choses de la nature et de leurs droits (Quae, 2020).
The title of the research project she is carrying out at Villa Medici is: “Du droit de déambuler. Réécrire les fictions juridiques à l’âge de l’anthropocène.” and is based on the study of the right to wander in response to ecological upheaval.
To do this, she plans to keep a survey diary in the language of law, to design legal tools to promote rights of passage and to write legal science fiction. In contrast to the generalised sedentary lifestyle favoured by our industrial societies, Sarah Vanuxem will rethink the rules of law from this fiction, which reimaginesus all as nomads. Since the right to walk on the land is often claimed by certain entities, she will follow the Italian beni comuni or ‘common property’ movement, with an investigation into the ‘Villa Borghese versus Rome’ ruling, by which the ius deambulandi was put into practice for those dwelling in the city of Rome in 1887. She will also join “Stalker”, the pioneering group of Roman artist-walkers. For Wildproject, she will prepare a book based on the following themes: ‘wandering’, ‘hunting, gathering, fishing, gleaning’, ‘transhumance’, ‘wandering’, and ‘fleeing and taking refuge’.
Ariane Varela Braga, art history
Ariane Varela Braga is an art and architectural historian. She has taught at the universities of Zurich (2014-2019), where she is preparing her habilitation thesis, and Geneva (2019-2020) and as a visiting professor at the University of Milan (2022). Her research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for Art History-Bibliotheca Hertziana, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Gandur Foundation for Art. In 2021 she was awarded an André Chastel Fellowship by the Villa Medici and the National Institute for Art History. A former member of the Swiss Institute of Rome, she is an associate researcher at HISTARA/EPHE and co-founder and coordinator of NeReMa-International network for research on marble and decorative stones.
Her research lies at the intersection of art history, architecture and material culture. Her doctoral thesis, defended at the University of Neuchâtel in 2013, was published under the title Une théorie universelle au milieu du XIXe siècle. The Grammar of Ornament d’Owen Jones (Campisano, 2017). She is the author of several articles and books on the theory of ornament, Orientalism in the decorative arts and architecture, and marble. In parallel to her research activities, she is an independent curator for exhibitions on the arts of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Her research project at Villa Medici, entitled “MARBLE. Identity, Memory and Materiality, from Italian Unification to Fascism”, focuses on the symbolism of marble and its use in Italian architecture, from the unification of the nation to Fascism. It aims to explore the link between material, materiality and collective identity at a time when the search for an Italian artistic and cultural identity, between tradition and renewal, became crucial. Focusing on Rome, the project considers the emblematic uses of marble in monumental and institutional architecture from the end of the 19th century to the Ventennio period (1922-1943), the narratives and discourses developed around its use, from a perspective at the crossroads of art and architecture history, memory studies and anthropology. The aim is to understand the mechanisms, practices and ideological, political, economic, technical and artistic issues that led to the “creation” of marble as a “national” material representative of Italian culture and identity.
Laura Vazquez, literature
Laura Vazquez writes. She has published several books of poetry with different publishers, including La main de la main (Prix de la Vocation) published by Cheyne in 2014, and Vous êtes de moins en moins réels published by Points in 2022. His first novel, La semaine perpétuelle, was published by Sous-sol in 2021. It received the special mention of the Prix Wepler and the Prix de la page 111. In March 2023, during her year of residency at the Villa Médicis, she published Le livre du large et du long at the Sous-sol publishing house. It is a versified epic that is accompanied by an audio part with a complete reading of the book. That same year she received the Prix Goncourt de la poésie (Goncourt prize for poetry) for the whole of her work.
Her texts have been translated into Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Arabic and Italian. In addition to writing, she regularly gives readings in France and around the world (Contemporary Museum of Shanghai in China, Musée d’art contemporain de Genève in Switzerland, Norsk Litteraturfestival in Norway, Festival Voix Vives Toledo in Spain, Fondation Perdu in Amsterdam in Holland, etc.). She co-edits the review Muscle with Roxana Hashemi. Finally, she leads workshops, masterclasses and writing workshops.
At Villa Medici, Laura Vazquez will write her first play: a lesbian tragedy.
Elles sont innocentes. Dans la tragédie tout le monde est innocent. Ce sera un texte dans un langage littéral, sans double et sans complicité. Le contraire du jeu de mot. Ce sera un texte jamais malin. Ce sera une catastrophe sur le point d’arriver, et ce sera sans recours. Chaque parole sera directe et directement par les yeux. Une histoire d’amour, la limite de notre condition. L’épopée et la tragédie traitant d’une même matière. L’épopée actionnant, la tragédie montrant. La bêtise humaine, le grand miroir jusqu’à la mort. C’est l’ignorance et l’innocence, tout sera pardonné. Une destinée héroïque forcément tourne mal. Au théâtre, au départ, il n’y avait qu’un personnage : le chœur Eschyle porta ce nombre à deux et donna le premier rôle au dialogue. Sophocle porta ce nombre à trois. Et voici les voix. Zg Zg, brr, brr, gang, gang, skuuuu
Saverio Verini, curator of the exhibition Una linea storta tesa
Saverio Verini is the curator of the Nuit Blanche 2021 and 2022 and the Residents’ Exhibition 2022 and 2023.
A curator of contemporary art exhibitions and events, Saverio Verini has collaborated with numerous institutions such as the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, the Italian Institute of Culture in Paris, the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, MACRO, the American Academy in Rome, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the ArtVerona fair, the Fondazione Memmo in Rome.
Since april 2023, he is Director of the municipal museums of Spoleto (Italy). A contributor to Artribune magazine, he is also the author of several critical texts, including the monograph Roberto Fassone. Quasi tutti i racconti (PostmediaBooks, 2018) and the essay La stagione fatata (Castelvecchi, 2022) on the relationship between childhood and contemporary art in Italy.
The scenography of the exhibition (furniture design) was created by Luca Galofaro (LGSMA).
Practical information
Opening time of the exhibition: Monday to Sunday (closed on Tuesdays) between 10am and 7pm (last entry at 6.30pm)
Prices Full price: 10€ / Reduced price: 8€ TRIBU card holders: 2€ / Free for SOLO or DUO card holders
From June 17th to July 2nd, every Saturday and Sunday from 2 pm to 7 pm, a mediation programme of the exhibition is organised in English in collaboration with the students ofNABA (Rome). From July 8th to July 22nd, the same programme will be organised every Saturday. Booking for commented visits in English
The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici would like to thank the patrons and partners who support its artistic programme and in particular this exhibition:
Sponsors CHANEL ACADÉMIE DES BEAUX-ARTS INSTITUT DE FRANCE FONDATION LOUIS ROEDERER FONDATION JEAN-LUC LAGARDÈRE FONDATION D’ENTREPRISE BANQUE POPULAIRE
With the support of CLUB CRIOLLO FATAMORGANA GROUPAMA ASSURANCES AIR FRANCE SOFITEL ROMA VILLA BORGHESE
