ÉTINCELLES / SCINTILLE Annual exhibition of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici’s Fellows
15 June – 7 August 2022
With the Villa Medici Fellows: Kaouther Adimi, Iván Argote, Charlie Aubry,Théodora Barat, Samir Boumediene, Nidhal Chamekh, Aude Fourel, Marta Gentilucci, Noémie Goddard, Evangelia Kranioti, Marielle Macé, Benoît Maire, Hèctor Parra, Julie Pellegrin, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, Guy Regis Jr.
Curator: Saverio Verini
PUBLIC OPENING ON TUESDAY 14 JUNE FROM 6 PM TO 9.30 PM Free entry
Visit to the exhibition and performance programme: – Performance by Guy Régis Jr. in collaboration with composer Kaoli Ono, soloist Cyrielle Ndjiki Nya and with the participation of the Piazza Vittorio Choir. – Performance by Emily Mast, at the invitation of Julie Pellegrin. – Performance by Kaouther Adimi and Guy Régis Jr. with music composed and played on the piano by Hèctor Parra accompanied by Imma Santacreu. – Performance reading by Marielle Macé, Breathe in / Speak out.
The exhibition Étincelles / Scintille brings together the work of sixteen artists, authors and researchers following a year of creative residency, experimentation and research at Villa Medici.
This annual artistic event lies at the crossroads of various practices, from the visual arts to musical composition, including literature, architecture, stage direction, art history and theory.
More than an exhibition in the classical sense of the term, it is more a restitution of 16 projects that testify to a singular moment in their journey: the residency as a laboratory for experimentation. What does the experience of the cohabitation of individualities and the meeting of such varied practices produce? From the walls of the studio to the exhibition halls, how do we give shape to an idea, a research? These questions accompany a journey of multiform proposals, served by a spatial layout that offers autonomy to each project while preserving its unity.
The title, Étincelles / Scintille in English meaning “sparks” suggests the idea of creation but also recalls both conflict (“cause sparks to fly”) and understanding (“the spark has occurred”).
This very visual term, linked to light and fire, capable of expressing the vitality of the fellows’ projects, evokes speed due to the inevitable temporality of a year of residency that is coming to an end and the desire of the fellows to leave a trace by restoring research conducted during their stay in Rome. Étincelles / Scintille is presented as a journey of correspondences, sometimes obvious, sometimes more subtle, between projects that present recurring themes: accumulation, the reiteration of gestures and signs, political reflection in the artistic field, the representation of fragmented bodies, the relationship between natural and artificial landscape. These themes are found throughout the projects presented in Villa Medici’s spaces according to a rhythm that seeks to underline potential dialogues and affinities between the various interventions.
Over the course of a summer, the exhibition rooms of Villa Medici are transformed into a space for reflection and experimentation that welcomes a wide variety of free proposals, whether expositive or performative, finished or unfinished. These interventions take us to the places – imaginary or physical, starting with Rome – that nourish the most current creation and extend beyond the framework of the exhibition.
On the occasion of the opening night on 14 June, four performances will be programmed: the first by Guy Régis Jr, from the multidisciplinary work What last great conflict to satisfy the hatred between humans, in collaboration with the composer Kaoli Ono, the soloist Cyrielle Ndjiki Nya and with the participation of the Piazza Vittorio Choir; the second by the American artist Emily Mast, who, at the invitation of Julie Pellegrin, will carry out the performance IFIF, an age-old group ritual carried out with a dozen performers on the piazzale of the Villa Medici. It takes the form of a game involving chance, dance and trance to open up other ways of being together. Los Angeles-based artist Emily Mast combines visual art, live performance and activism to explore power dynamics and the subversion of seemingly immutable hierarchies. The third performance will bring together three residents around an unpublished text by Kaouther Adimi entitled Versailles. Read and directed jointly by Guy Régis Jr. and Kaouther Adimi, it will be accompanied by music composed by Hèctor Parra, who will perform it on the piano with Imma Santacreu. Finally, Marielle Macé will combine the visual poem she created with the graphic designer Francesco Armitti for the exhibition of the boarders with a performance reading of Breathe in / Speak out ; in this new text, she explores the relationship between speech and breathing, and tries to clean up our atmospheres at least a little with her sentences.
Étincelles / Scintille includes a catalogue of projects by the fellows of the French Academy in Rome. The publication also includes a series of collective pages devoted to dialogues and exchanges between the fellows: these sections are presented as “intervals” within the catalogue, leaving room for incursions, in-depth studies and free associations on various themes that have marked the experience of the fellows at Villa Medici.
CATALOGUE:
The book is available for sale at Villa Medici. 16,00€ 164 pages ISBN 97888893000406 French version, with Italian and English translations in a separate booklet.
The 2021-2022 Villa Medici Fellows:
Kaouther Adimi, writer
Born in 1986 in Algiers, Kaouther Adimi is a writer, playwright and screenwriter. After her first two books, Des ballerines de papicha (Vocation Prize, 2011)) and Des pierres dans ma poche (Stones in my Pocket), she enjoyed major success with Nos richesses (Our Riches – Renaudot Prize for young adult fiction), published by Le Seuil in 2017, an evocation of the legendary bookseller and publisher Edmond Charlot. Her fourth novel, Les petits de Décembre (December’s Children – Young Adults’ Metis Novel Award) appeared in 2019.
Her work mixes archives and fiction, reality and imagination, appropriating places to transform them, exhuming forgotten stories to put them back into narrative.
Kaouther Adimi contributes to numerous magazines and writes for the theatre and cinema.
At Villa Medici, she is working on her fifth novel, Au vent mauvais, in which, through the intertwined destinies of three characters, she paints a great fresco of Algeria, spanning almost a century, from colonisation to the struggle for independence, up to the summer of 1992, when the country plunged into civil war. Au vent mauvais will be published in September 2022 by Éditions du Seuil.
Directly inspired by her residency at Villa Medici, Kaouther Adimi has imagined Le paon rose (The Pink Peacock), a tale written for France Inter’s “OLI” programme, set to music for the Nuit blanche (November 2021) by Hèctor Parra and Imma Santacreu.
Iván Argote, visual artist and film director
Born in Bogota (Colombia) in 1983, Iván Argote is a visual artist.
Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, Iván Argote questions our intimate relationships with other people, institutions, power, and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour, through which he suggests critical approaches to prevailing historical narratives and attempts to decentralise them. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale installations and performances, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic uses of public space. His works are included in numerous major collections across the world, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York, United States), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, United States), the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, United States), the Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogota, Colombia), Kadist (San Francisco, United States) and MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).
The project he is working on at Villa Medici is based on Rome’s heritage and the fact that the city possesses the largest number of obelisks in the world: eight from Ancient Egypt, five from the Roman era and countless other modern examples. It is their temporal and geographical journeys that Iván Argote has decided to devote himself to during his residency. There are two components to his project: a documentary film in which a pigeon is our guide in discovery of Rome’s various obelisks, and a series of onsite installations at Villa Medici, inspired by the obelisk in its gardens.
Charlie Aubry, visual artist and musician
Born in Lillebonne (France) in 1990, Charlie Aubry is a visual artist.
Charlie Aubry is a graduate of Toulouse’s Higher School of Fine Arts, obtaining a National Diploma in Visual Arts (DNAP) in 2012 and a National Postgraduate Diploma in Visual Expression (DNSEP) with honours in 2014. He is developing his artistic practice around electronics, through which he examines error as a method of learning. He started off by repurposing electronic objects, turning them into tools for audio and visual creation.
He has collaborated regularly with the Maguy Marin Company since 2013: in 2014, he composed the soundtrack for their show BiT and then for DEUX MILLE DIX SEPT (TWO THOUSAND AND SEVENTEEN), played live during its performance.In 2018, he was responsible for the music and set design of the Company’s latest creation, Ligne de Crète (Ridge Line).
The project he is working on at Villa Medici enables him to continue with the research he started on with the installation p3.450, focusing on the relationships between technology, usages and art. The installation p3.450 is a critical utopia, an anticipatory scenario highlighting certain technological usages and their limitations. According to Charlie Aubry, this sort of speculative usage scenario is a concrete expression of possible changes – whether technological or societal – via objects and devices. The artist’s installation and research examine behaviours and enable him to cast a critical eye on social phenomena. During his residency, Charlie Aubry wants to write new usage scenarios and protocols, making theoretical contributions set to go hand-in-hand with his sculptures and installations.
Théodora Barat, visual artist and film director
Born in the Paris region in 1985, Théodora Barat is a visual artist.
Théodora Barat studied at Nantes’ School of Fine arts before enrolling at The Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts. She is currently developing a research and creation thesis for the RADIAN Doctoral programme. Her awards include the Audi Talents Prize in 2016, the FACE / Étant Donnés grant and Individual Creative Assistance (AIC) in 2020, and the Institute for Photography’s Research and Creation Support Programme’ grant in 2021.
Her work mixes sculpture, film, installation, video and photography. It has been presented at K11 – Musea (Hong Kong), the CNEAI, the Emily Harvey Foundation and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York), Nuit Blanche, the Friche de la Belle de Mai, Mains d’Œuvres, Glassbox and CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), as well as in the context of the Palais de Tokyo’s video programming and at numerous international festivals.
The project she is working on at Villa Medici focuses on study of and research on the possibility of a documentary form of sculpture. How do you imbue a sculpture with documentary value without making it a re-enactment? How do you reproduce a historical context without making it a simple illustration? The project originated in the constructions occupying Fellini’s backdrops, in dismantled Italian nuclear power stations and rationalist architecture. All of them are different incarnations of modernity, different witnesses to its shifts and changes. The project seeks to reveal the historicity and documentary value of these structures. Based on this corpus, Théodora Barat is set to create a series of sculptures, located and staged on Rome’s outskirts, so blurring the frontiers between filming, construction site and re-creation. The reanimated past and reactivated narratives will put different temporalities on a collision course. But this time, the remains will be purely fictional. .
Samir Boumediene, researcher and storyteller
Born in Moselle in 1985, Samir Boumediene is a historian of knowledge and the arts.
A researcher at the CNRS with a doctorate in Modern History, he published his thesis in 2016 under the title La colonisation du savoir. Une histoire des plantes médicinales du Nouveau Monde (The Colonisation of Knowledge. A History of medicinal plants in the New World).
The research project he is conducting at Villa Medici is devoted to an expression: “Time reveals the truth” or “Veritas Filias Temporis”, particularly used in Italian art of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By analysing the paintings, engravings, drawings, sculptures and tapestries that evoke this idea, the aim is to understand the importance that the theme of discovery acquires in the cultural, social and political history of the arts. In Italy, this theme is in fact associated with various reflections on the novelty of the times, invention, conflicts between artists and the practice of political secrecy. Through this motto, it is therefore possible to document the Italian contribution to the tensions that have inhabited Europe, between new and old, secrecy and lies, vision of progress and fear of the end.
At the same time, Samir Boumediene is conducting projects at the intersection of culinary and visual arts. As an extension of his research on fermentation practices and the use of spices, he took advantage of his residency in Rome to write a documentary on soffritto.
Also called sofregit in Catalan or sofrito in Castilian, soffritto is the basis of many dishes and sauces in Mediterranean cuisine. Behind the infinite variations, it consists in the combination of a fat and a representative of the genus alium (especially onion, garlic, shallot). Although it has no equivalent in the vocabulary of French cuisine, it plays an equally fundamental role. This is also true of many other cuisines in Asia, Africa and America where, despite the stinging eyes and the risk of injury, the preparation of dishes starts with the cutting of a pungent bulb.
By tracing the history of the soffritto and its recompositions in the age of fusion cuisine, the aim of this documentary is to highlight the attention to the guests that characterizes the culinary gesture and gives so many dishes (risotto, caponata, ratatouille, Catalan sauce, mirepoix sauce, etc.) the essence of their flavour. .
Nidhal Chamekh, visual artist
Born in Dahmani (Tunisia) in 1965), Nidhal Chamekh is a visual artist.
Nidhal Chamekh is a graduate of Tunis’ Higher Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He continues to work and live between the two cities. His work is situated at the crossroads of the biographical and the political, the lived and the historical, event and archive. It fragments, dismantles and dissects the constitution of our contemporary identity.
His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, the Aïchi Triennial, the Architecture Biennial in Orléans, the Rencontres de Bamako, the Videobrasil Biennial, the Dakar Biennial and the Dream City Biennial in Tunis, and has been presented at the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Drawing Room in London, the FM Contemporary Art Center in Milan, MAC Lyon, Kunsthaus Hamburg, CCA Lagos and the Hood Museum among other venues.
The project he is working on at Villa Medici is entitled “Et si Carthage n’avait pas été détruite?” (And what if Carthage hadn’t been destroyed?). The idea is to take Édouard Glissant’s question literally and open up its historical, artistic and symbolic potential, focusing on the survival of relationships between Rome and North Africa and their historical resonance in the present day in terms of migrant “crises” and geopolitical tensions.
His artistic project seeks to introduce Rome’s archaeological heritage and the marginalised cultural production of the City’s exiles, in a process of montage in which present and past are jointly defined. .
Aude Fourel, filmmaker
Born in Saint-Étienne (France) in 1978, Aude Fourel is a filmmaker.
Aude Fourel works essentially with Super 8 film, confronting it with digital technologies in order to reveal the image’s inherent fragilities and instabilities. She directs, edits and produces her films on the borderline between creative documentary and art film. The main themes in her creations are crossings, walking and filming, anonymous stories and political commitment. Her filmography is made up of short and medium-length performative videos. Aude Fourel teaches film practices and documentary filmmaking at the University of Grenoble-Alpes (France).
The project she is working on at Villa Medici is entitled Récits d’Elissa (Elissa’s Stories) and tells of everyday acts of resistances in Palestine through several characters and a puppet, each of them guardian of a story locked away in bits of archives. Fragments of 16mm film conserved in Rome, abandoned family films; anonymous recordings and kilometres of crossings, these stories have a strong smell of salt (sea and silver) and orange-trees about them. Aude Fourel sets off to Rome, works in the film director Monica Maurer’s archives, looks for reels of films put to one side, and walks alongside these characters, in the present. .
Marta Gentilucci, composer
Born in Gualdo Tadino (Italy) in 1973, Marta Gentilucci is a composer.
Marta Gentilucci studied singing in Italy and composition in Germany under Marco Stroppa. She holds a PhD in composition from Harvard University in the United States, supervised by Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku. She was selected for residencies at IRCAM, the Experimentalstudio des SWR and the Akademie der Künste‘s electronic studio in Berlin. Her music has been performed internationally and her electronic music was selected for the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, as well as for several editions of the International Computer Music Festival (ICMC). Marta obtained the ICMC’s “Best Paper Award” in 2018, and the “Best Piece – Regional, Europe” in 2019. In 2018-2019, she was a Fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (United States). Among her most recent activities, IRCAM and Neue Vocalsolisten commissioned two new pieces for voice and electronics from her, both created during the MANIFESTE Festival (Paris, 2020) and then presented at the ECLAT Festival (Stuttgart, 2021). The project Marta Gentilucci is working on at Villa Medici bears on creation of an audiovisual installation with the American photographer Susan Meiselas. A collaborative project born of the desire to create the image of an ageing woman’s body as seen through our eyes and ears, in the form of “cartographies of the body”, tracing a map of the skin, wrinkles and expressions that speak of a life lived, but still full of energy and possibilities.
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Noémie Goddard, interior architect
Born in Chambéry (France) in 1985, Noémie Goddard is an interior architect.
Trained in Applied Arts at the Boulle School and then at the École Normale Supérieure in Cachan, her comprehensive transdisciplinary architectural practice establishes dialogue between architecture, interior architecture and furniture design.
Associate Director of Creation and Communication in a Parisian architecture agency since 2009, she exercises and implements her reflections in a broad range of applications, from public buildings to microarchitecture via rehabilitation. In 2015, she cofounded a laboratory dedicated to interior architecture, in which they have developed a unique, unifying design methodology that seeks to reconcile scales and overlap disciplines, valorise fine craftsmanship and initiate artistic collaborations within architectural projects.
The project she is working on at Villa Medici aims to make a broad study of the question of interior and interiority, going beyond inhabiting in order to bring forth new arts of living. The project is located in Rome, a paradoxical example of capacities for reinventing the built landscape and disasters connected with over-urbanity, with a view to examining the reshaping of interior spaces as a way forward in the face of the excessive use made of resources that new constructions require. In the form of an investigation, bringing together chronicles and research applied to a work, the project is set to provide a historical and critical reinterpretation of interior layouts. Will the interior, adaptable and always in the making, guarantee our ability to inhabit tomorrow’s world? If interiors and individuals interact reciprocally, what new links might be envisaged between built envelopes, interior landscapes, and those who inhabit them?
Evangelia Kranioti, visual artist and film director
Evangelia Kranioti is a Greek artist and film director based in France. She studied law (National University of Athens), visual arts (École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris) and cinema (Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Atelier Scénario – La Fémis).
Winner of numerous grants and awards, Evangelia Kranioti develops an artistic work that embraces photography, film and video installation. Her first feature documentary Exotica, Erotica, Etc. (2015 Berlinale Forum) was selected in several international festivals (including IDFA, BFI London FF, Göteborg IFF, Thessaloniki IDF, Karlovy Vary IFF, Sarajevo IFF) where it received numerous awards, as well as two Iris awards from the Hellenic Film Academy. Her second film Obscuro Barroco (2018 Berlinale Panorama, TEDDY Jury Prize) also won him several awards, including two Iris of the Hellenic Film Academy, as well as several nominations (American Society of Cinematography Documentary award, Cinema Eye Honors, Glashütte Original Documentary Award, Sheffield Doc/Fest Art Award, among others). In 2019, her exhibition Les vivants, les morts et ceux qui sont en mer (“The Living, the Dead and Those at Sea”), presented at the 50th edition of the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, was acclaimed by the international press and awarded the Prix Madame Figaro.
Her photographic and filmic project at Villa Medici, entitled Les messagers, explores the issue of migration in the Mediterranean through the figure of Hermes and the prism of myth. .
Marielle Macé, writer
Born in Paimboeuf (France) in 1973, Marielle Macé is a researcher and writer.
Research Director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at EHESS (Paris), Marielle Macé is also a guest lecturer in Chicago, New York (NYU) and Berkeley, and was associate author at the Théâtre des Amandiers.
Her books (essays and poems) make use of literature to give thought to and discuss different forms of life – social life, community life, precarious lives and vulnerable landscapes. Her published works include Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie (Styles. A Critique of our Forms of Life – Gallimard, 2016), “Nous” (Us) (ed., Critique, 2017), Sidérer, considérer. Migrants en France (Bewilder, Consider. Migrants in France – Verdier, 2017), “Vivre dans un monde abîmé” (Living in a Damaged World) (ed., Critique, 2019), Nos cabanes (Our Cabins – Verdier, 2019), and Parole et pollution (Words and Pollution – AOC, 2021).
The investigative writing project she is working on at Villa Medici is entitled La Vie poreuse (Porous Life) and is set to take the pulse of Rome’s river and the lives involved in it: observing what happens when you defend wetlands, when you reopen city rivers, when you try to make surfaces permeable again or dig up buried memories, drawing on thought and writings on the phenomena of infiltration, liaison and percolation — for porous life demands to be heard, attention that will irrigate it in its turn and water landscapes for the common good. .
Benoît Maire, visual artist
Born in Pessac (France) in 1978, Benoît Maire is a visual artist.
After studying philosophy, Benoît Maire obtained his National Higher Diploma in Visual Expression (DNSEP) at Villa Arson in Nice before carrying out a research residency at the Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo. Using philosophy, historical texts and artistic references as departure points, Benoît Maire has developed a polymorphous practice that is also deployed in the form of lectures, publications and exhibition curatorships. He nurtures his thoughts on theory and its practical expression through objects and texts by collaborating regularly with such artists as Étienne Chambaud, Alex Cecchetti and Falke Pisano.
The research project he is working on at Villa Medici is entitled “La main en peinture et le papier imprimé” (The Hand in Painting and Printed Paper). It consists of producing a series of works in different mediums (photographs, paintings, texts and sculptures) which together will form an investigation of the transition from the iconic hand of Italian primitivism to the fleshly hand of the Renaissance. His hypothesis suggests that the appearance of the printing press in the late 15th century helped reformulate paintings of hands, which lost their power of conceptual (deictic) designation and acquired a more realistic affective weight. Benoît Maire’s work resides in the tension that arises when the hand seeks to find itself between two sensitive systems. .
Hèctor Parra, composer
Born in Barcelona (Spain) in 1976, Hèctor Parra is a composer.
Hèctor Parra studied at the Barcelona Conservatory, where he was awarded several prizes with distinction in Composition and Piano. In 2002-2003 he attended IRCAM’s programme on Composition and Computer Music and then continued his training at Royaumont, Centre Acanthes, Takefu in Japan, and Geneva’s Higher School of Music under B. Ferneyhough, J. Harvey, M. Jarrell, P. Leroux and P. Manoury. He has received numerous commissions from such institutions as the Louvre Museum, the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and the Gürzenich Orchester Köln. His music is regularly included in the programming of such concert halls as the Paris Philharmonic, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Cologne Philharmonic, the Barcelona Auditori, the Palau de la Música Catalana (resident composer from 2015 to2017), the Nouveau Siècle in Lille (resident composer in 2017-2018), the Gasteig in Munich and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Hèctor Parra has devoted himself to lyrical composition and his works are published by Durand. Since 2002 he has lived in Paris, where he taught composition at Ircam from 2013 to 2017.
The project he is working on at Villa Medici is devoted to composition of the chamber opera Orgia (Orgy), inspired by Pier Paulo Pasolini’s theatrical text of the same name exposing his personal drama. The opera’s male protagonist carries out the most powerful act imaginable: an accusatory suicide that shows up a society filled with incomprehension, hypocrisy, cruelty and contempt for all types of minorities. The opera is to be written for three solo voices, a modern instrumental ensemble and a baroque instrument (archlute). His residency at Villa Medici will provide an opportunity to carry out field research on Pasolini and the city of Rome where he chose to live, became a filmmaker and where he was able to nurture his intellectual development devoted to social criticism. .
Julie Pellegrin, curator and art critic
Curator and critic, Julie Pellegrin is interested in the notion of performativity in its broadest sense. She explores the manner in which the relationships between visual arts, choreography and theatrics affect the way exhibitions are mounted today. Through exhibitions, research projects and publications (Take Care, The Yvonne Rainer Project, Alfred Jarry Archipelago, Chorégraphier l’exposition (Choreographing Exhibitions), Kapwani Kiwanga, Chantal Akerman, Myriam Lefkowitz, Alex Cecchetti, Marie Preston, etc.), and more extensive programming (the Performance Day Festival, Nuit Blanche 2013 and Les Formes du Délai), she accompanies often ephemeral practices that include social, political and ethical examinations of questions of relationships and attention.
The research project Julie Pellegrin is working on at Villa Medici is part of a larger work she is devoting to performance in contemporary art. In it, she examines current politics of performance through the prism of references to postmodern dance, recent developments in performance studies and, more specifically, anarchist theories and practices. With a view to exploring the hypothesis of a relationship between anarchy and performance, she starts out from a historical event – the Galleria L’Attico project created by Fabio Sargentini between 1968 and 1976, along with Simone Forti and performers from Judson Dance and Grand Union – in order to attempt to make a connection between that revolutionary experiment and the current performance scene in Italy. Combining archival exploration, interviews and organisation of public encounters, Julie Pellegrin will be carrying out collective speculative research at Villa Medici. .
Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, designer
Born in Sallanches (France) in 1983, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini is a designer.
Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini graduated with honours from ENSCI-Les Ateliers School of Industrial Design for his project Sophistication (2012). Largely based on the history of design and architecture, the research involved focused on various interpretations of the sophistication of a form, and was awarded the Villa Noailles Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 2013. Peyroulet Ghilini then became designer in residence at Sèvres-National Manufacture and Museum, and at the International Research Centre for Glass and Visual Arts (CIRVA) in Marseille. Awarded a residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 2017 alongside Laureline Galliot, he was also named the Maison et Objet Fair’s “Rising Talent” in 2020.
The project he is working on at Villa Medici is entitled “Virtualisation, Fragment, Objet en attente” (Virtualisation, Fragment, Object in Waiting). It examines the existence of forms and their tangible expression, along with the relationships they have with each other through, the prism of technology. .
Guy Regis Jr., writer and stage director
Born in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) in April 1974, Guy Régis Jr. is a writer and stage director. Many of his texts, comprising plays, novels and poetry, have been translated into several languages. He recently published Les Cinq Fois où j’ai vu mon père (The Five Times I Saw my Father – 2020, Gallimard) and the play Goebbels, juif et footballeur (Goebbels, Jew and Footballer – 2020), published by Les Solitaires Intempestifs, which issues his theatrical works. A translator into Creole, Guy Régis Jr. has also directed short experimental films. In 2001, he founded the NOUS Théâtre company, which went on to upend the codes of contempory theatre, in particular by creating Service Violence Série (2005), which was nothing less than a dramaturgical political act and the starting point for his future work. His polymorphous creations have been presented in France (Les Francophonies Festival in Limoges, the Avignon Festival’s IN, and a number of Scènes Nationales), in Haiti and on the international stage (including the United States, Colombia, Chili, Brazil, Belgium, Italy and Madagascar). In addition to his creations, he is actively involved in developing the living arts in Haiti. Guy Régis Jr. is the Festival 4 Chemins’ current artistic director.
The writing project he is working on at Villa Medici examines the showcasing of images of hatred in our contemporary society. An attempt at exhausting all our human conflicts through creation and negotiation, as never before has an era made so public a display of the most hidden acts of family violence, along with those of open war between the world’s giants. We are constantly fed images of the nuclear threat, bombings, abductions, kidnappings, femicide, rapes, police violence, etc., as if our era wanted to make them more intimate. Guy Régis Jr. is looking to create a work that unites our everyday offences into a single whole and have them discussed in an Agora, a Forum, for a full day. “Quel dernier grand conflit pour satisfaire la haine entre les humains?” (What Final Great Conflict to Satiate the Hatred between Human Beings?) is a transdisciplinary work to whose composition he wishes to devote himself, a kind of plural dramaturgy where the audience is invited to continue the debate initiated by Einstein and Freud on the “inevitable” need for clashes and wars between human beings. Addressing/Dressing our wounds through solidarity. .
Saverio Verini, curator of the Fellows’ exhibition
Saverio Verini is curator of the Nuit Blanche 2021 and the 2022 Fellows’ exhibition.
As curator of contemporary art exhibitions and events, Saverio Verini has cooperated with numerous institutions such as the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Parigi, the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, the MACRO, the American Academy in Rome, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. He is currently coordinating exhibitions at the Memmo Foundation in Rome. He is a contributor to the magazine Artribune, and the author of several critical texts.
VISIT THE EXHIBITION PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Opening hours: Monday to Sunday (closed on Tuesdays) from 10.30am to 7pm (last entry at 6.30pm) Friday and Saturday from 10.30am to 8pm (last entry at 7.30pm)
