Nuit Blanche

The 2019 edition of Villa Medici’s Nuit Blanche will feature fellows of the Académie de France in Rome, in residence from September 2019 to August 2020. Visual artists, writers, composers, art historians, filmmakers, architects, designers: all the boarders have been invited by curator Saverio Verini to participate, making the Nuit Blanche a moment of encounter and hybridization between disciplines and expressive forms. Over the course of a few hours, the fellows’ interventions will take over the main and more isolated spaces of Villa Medici, both inside and outside the building, before disappearing into the night. Visual artworks, installations, projections, sound interventions and performances will bring the Villa to life, presenting the fellows to the city of Rome and its public: a reciprocal encounter under the banner of artistic creation.

This new edition is entitled Les Amants irréguliers (Irregular Lovers ), which cites – but does not repeat the plot of – director Philippe Garrel’s film Les Amants réguliers (2005). The title refers to a relationship that is discontinuous and passionate, conflicted and intense, and probably destined to fade away; a relationship similar to the one the boarders have with the Villa Medici and Rome, which is reflected in Nuit Blanche. Without constituting a programmatic statement, Les Amants irréguliers thus represents a trace favoring the coexistence of heterogeneous practices and poetics, free to express themselves in the spaces of Villa Medici.