Villa Medici supports fellows in their post-residency career and encourages the circulation of their work in France through two initiatives: ¡ Viva Villa ! and production grants.
Created in 2016, ¡ Viva Villa ! is an initiative of the major French residences abroad: Villa Medici (Rome), Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) – and since 2023, with Villa Medici Albertine (USA). Working together to provide professional support for their former residents fellows, the four Villa Medici residencies have developed ¡Viva Villa! in the form of an event that has spread throughout the network of cultural institutions, theaters, festivals, stages and art centers in mainland France and overseas. The idea? To co-produce a dozen or so projects throughout France each season (exhibitions, concerts, performances, editorial and radio projects), highlighting the work of creators from the four institutions. This program gives French audiences the chance to discover the work they have carried out during their residencies in Rome, Madrid, Kyoto and the United States.
This project was conceived as an extension of Hélène Bertin’s residencies at Villa Medici (Rome) and Sébastien Desplat’s at Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto). Engaged in an artistic exploration of living resources, popular and artisanal know-how and their links with natural materials, they will be accompanied by an imagière, Bettina Henni, and a specialist craftswoman. plant colors, Lola Verstrepen.Travelling back and forth between Rome, Marseille and the Luberon, these four creators will combine their sensibilities and techniques for an original joint production that will be presented on Saturday August 31 at 11am at Studio Fotokino for the opening of a joint exhibition running until September 21.
As part of the Lyon Biennial, Alix Boillot presents two salt installations (L’Éternité (2) and Lacrymatoires) and a performance (L’Éternité (1)) on October 12 and 13.
The MAT program focuses on water in all its forms, from sensitive to poetic to scientific approaches. Following a series of encounters from May 14 to 17, the program includes screenings and workshops open to all, in collaboration with the École des beaux-arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, the École supérieure d’art et de design TALM and the École primaire Joachim Du Bellay de Montrelais. The “Nous les vagues” exhibition explores local water resources with a transdisciplinary approach.
Through a system of production grants, Villa Medici supports its fellows artists by co-financing, with the help of cultural partners, the projects they initiate during their residency in Rome. One of Villa Medici’s concerns is to think about the post-residency period, as part of a collaborative approach. The introduction of this support scheme in 2018 has enabled many partners to be involved, creating a leverage effect so that the artists’ projects can see the light of day.
The exhibition features works by pioneers of monumental drawing and up-and-coming talents. Especially for Size Matters, Lise Sore creates a new work. For these artists, the large format is not an occasional outing, but an essential part of their work, in which they persevere despite the mental and physical tour de force it demands of them each time. In this way, the museum wishes to draw attention to the emancipation of drawing in recent decades, and present it as a formidable counterpart to painting.
This international colloquium celebrates the centenary of Erwin Panofsky’s lecture, “Perspective as Symbolic Form”, with a series of lectures and screenings that interrogate histories of perspective, from painting to cinema to artificial intelligence.
For several months, composer and cellist Séverine Ballon ran music workshops at three Samusocial centers in Paris and Ivry-sur-Seine. From these rich encounters, sharing and exchanges, she recorded numerous songs and chants, and composed a piece for the two musicians and a recorded tape.
For its latest edition in partnership with the Villa Medici, Académie de France in Rome, the Genius Loci association presented in Paris, in a place emblematic of the history of modern architecture, a group of “Roman” works by multidisciplinary artist Benoît Maire.
“My mouth was now wide open and from then on my neck lengthened in a way that seemed disturbingly disproportionate, bringing my face to the edge of the fleshy little leaves, my lips soon touching their glaze, my nose breathing in a close-up muddy, herbaceous scent, until I experienced, on my tongue, a syrupy freshness, a taste of slightly bitter greenery, raw green beans, light parsley.” In the Marais du Vigueirat reserve, where Céline Curiol finds herself immersed alone for a year, the invasive primrose willow is everywhere, to the point of haunting her dreams. Through her encounters with a whole ecosystem of plants, animals, women and men, the writer explores the paradox of nature conservation: to preserve heritage species, humans have to go to extraordinary lengths, far removed from the supposed spontaneity of the wild. With sensitivity and force, Céline Curiol recounts an extraordinary experience woven of astonishment, enthusiasm, fear and doubt, and questions the concepts of nature and invasion that guide our relationship with any environment. An epic journey into the intimate metamorphosis of a writer, and through a Camargue far removed from tourist clichés, and all the more endearing for it…
The Feminist Art History Conference fosters intersectional and interdisciplinary research into how gender and sexuality have shaped the visual arts and their study, with a conference program designed to promote new research on topics ranging from antiquity to the present day and across the globe. It provides a forum for participants to examine the roles that art and its actors have played in informing and resisting historical and contemporary inequalities. Through this forum, the Conference aims to promote a more inclusive art history and academic community.
Since 2012, Yasmin Benabderrahmane has been traveling across the sand dunes and plains of her native Morocco, using visual language to recapture what she lost during fourteen years of absence. La Bête is a material story played out between two worlds: the Morocco of yesteryear, made of raw materials that insinuate themselves between bodies, and the modern Morocco of concrete and rock. In the spaces and flesh of his family and childhood, Benabderrahmane accompanies us along a tortuous path of details and textures, of hands that shape, reproducing the same gestures over and over again. The artist’s gaze rests delicately on the intimacy of passing time, on dripping stones, irrevocably marking the destiny of Moroccan history.