Exhibition | SIREN SONGS

Water as told by artists

From 4 October 2024 to 13 January 2025

Curators: Caroline Courrioux and Sam Stourdzé

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Following the exhibition Stories of Stones (2023), Villa Medici is continuing its exploration of the elements with a journey around the theme of water, featuring works by around 30 internationally renowned contemporary artists. Ten of these creations have been specifically designed for the occasion.

On the ground and in the atmosphere, as both an element and a resource, water constitutes us and overflows the world. Protean in form – rain, seas, droplets, dew, streams, clouds, fog, and tears – it is the essential source of all life. Diverted, extracted, and polluted, water has now become a vital issue in the ongoing ecological crisis. But although it has been conquered, the abyssal depths remain today more mysterious than the Moon, land of dreams, inhabited by fantastic monsters.

This exhibition follows the cycle of water, from sunken civilizations to ritual practices and the troubled waters of trade routes. The hybrid figure of the siren or mermaid, by turns malevolent and protective, half woman, half animal, acts as a guide to navigate between these worlds, from the depths to the surface. Her ambivalence resonates with that of water, a space of metamorphoses, between waters of rejuvenation and of doom.

The show invites us to explore the different states of water through the artists’ eyes, from its representation to its political implications, from the commodity transformed into a resource to the metaphorical quest for its source. Diving into this liquid world opens up a host of contradictions, when tales of water’s origins intermingle with those that conjure up future times in which it threatens us with flooding and drought, and sea levels rise while rivers run dry.

THE EXHIBITION IN SEVEN CHAPTERS

*artists whose pieces have been specially commissioned for the exhibition.

THE CURATORS

THE CATALOGUE

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Editions Empire and Villa Medici.

Extract from the exhibition catalogue

“Sirens, or mermaids, are part of our feminist history, and losing sight of this fact leads us to consider them without correlating them to gender, species, race, humanity […] They force us to focus attention on the question of becoming, on that of life in streams of water that make the world permeable and connected, outside any fantasy of total purification. This should serve not as a model, but as a guide: political, artistic, academic, and above all ethical. Becoming-sirens are intimately linked to our futures and to reinventing the subject in these times of our tragic ecologies.”

Myriam Bahaffou

Catalogue information

28 €
352 pages
Around 170 illustrations
Format: 15,7 x 21,8
ISBN 979-10-95991-39-7

Authors of the catalogue

Myriam Bahaffou, philosopher; Alix Boillot, artist; Julien d’Huy, historian of myths; Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, historian of religions; Sarah Rey, historian of Antiquity; Himali Singh Soin, artist; Ala Tannir, architect; Justinien Tribillon, urbanist.

The catalogue includes texts by Seneca and Pliny the Elder.

→ More information coming soon.

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→ Press release on the exhibition Siren Songs

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

SELF-GUIDED TOURS
Date: October 4, 2024 – January 13, 2025
Opening hours: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, except Tuesdays (closed)
Price: €10 / €8 / €2

GUIDED TOURS
October – Sundays 13 and 27 at 12pm
November – Sundays 10 and 24 at 12pm
December – Sundays 8 and 22 at 12 pm
January – Sunday 5 at 12pm

Price: €14 / €11 / €5
Language: Italian

FAMILY VISITS
Date: from October 12, 2024

Timetable:
In French: every Saturday at 4:30pm
Price: €7

In Italian: every Saturday at 3:00 pm

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