sparks sparkle

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1983, Iván Argote is a visual artist.

Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, Iván Argote questions our intimate relationship with others, institutions, power and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humor, through which he suggests critical approaches to dominant historical narratives and attempts to decentralize them. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale installations and performances, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic uses of public space. His work is included in many renowned collections worldwide, including those of the Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, USA), Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, USA), Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogota, Colombia), Kadist (San Francisco, USA) and MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

His project at Villa Medici is rooted in the heritage of the city of Rome, and its distinction of possessing the largest number of obelisks in the world: eight from ancient Egypt, five from Roman times and countless others from the modern era. During his residency, Iván Argote intends to focus on these obelisks in both time and space. His project is twofold: a documentary film in which a pigeon takes us on a journey of discovery of Rome’s different obelisks, and a series of site-specific installations at Villa Medici around the obelisk itself.
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Born in 1985 in the Paris region, Théodora Barat is a visual artist and film-maker.

Théodora Barat studied at the Beaux-Arts de Nantes before joining Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains. She is currently developing a research and creation thesis within the RADIAN doctoral program. Her awards include the Audi Talents Prize (2016), the FACE / Étant Donnés grant, the AIC (2020) and the Institut pour la Photographie’s research and creation support program (2021).

His work combines sculpture, film, installation, video and photography. He has been presented at K11 – Musea (Hong Kong), Cneai, Emily Harvey Foundation and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York), Nuit Blanche, Friche de la Belle de Mai, Mains d’Œuvres, Glassbox, CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), as well as in video programming at Palais de Tokyo and numerous international festivals.

Her project at Villa Medici focuses on studying and researching the possibility of documentary sculpture. How can a sculpture be given documentary value without becoming a reconstruction? How can we restore a historical context without turning it into an illustration? The project’s origins lie in Fellini’s background buildings, decommissioned Italian nuclear power plants and rationalist architecture. All are different incarnations of modernity, different witnesses to its shifts and mutations. The project aims to reveal the historicity and documentary value of these constructions. Based on this corpus, Théodora Barat will create a series of sculptures, installed and staged on the outskirts of Rome. This will blur the boundaries between filming, construction site and reconstruction. This reanimated past, these reactivated narratives, will make different temporalities collide. But this time, the remains will be fictional.
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Born in 1985 in Dahmani (Tunisia), Nidhal Chamekh is a visual artist.

Nidhal Chamekh is a graduate of the Institut supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and the Sorbonne University in Paris. He continues to work and live between the two cities. His work lies at the crossroads of the biographical and the political, the lived and the historical, the event and the archive. It fragments, unravels and dissects the constitution of our contemporary identity.

His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Aïchi Triennale, the Orléans Architecture Biennial, the Rencontres de Bamako, the Videobrasil Biennial, the Dakar Biennial, the Dream City Biennial in Tunis and has been shown at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Drawing Room in London, the FM Contemporary Art Center in Milan, the MAC Lyon, the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the CCA Lagos and the Hood Museum, among others.

His project at Villa Médicis is entitled “Et si Carthage n’avait pas été détruite? The aim is to take Édouard Glissant’s question literally, and unfold its historical, artistic and symbolic potential. It will take shape through the survival and historical resonance of current relations between Rome and North Africa, and the migratory “crises” and geopolitical tensions they entail.

Her artistic project seeks to introduce Roman archaeological heritage and the marginalized cultural production of the city’s exiles into a montage process where the present and the past are jointly defined.
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Born in 1973 in Gualdo Tadino (Italy), Marta Gentilucci is a composer.

Marta Gentilucci studied singing in Italy and composition in Germany with Marco Stroppa. She holds a doctorate in composition from Harvard University, USA, with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.

She has been in residence at Ircam, the SWR Experimentalstudio and the electronics studio of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Her music has been performed internationally, and her electronic music has been selected by the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and several editions of the International Computer Music Festival (ICMC). Marta received the ICMC’s “Best Paper Award” in 2018, and the “Best Piece – Regional, Europe” in 2019. In 2018-2019, she was a resident at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (USA).

Among his most recent activities, Ircam and the Neue Vocalsolisten commissioned two new pieces for voice and electronics, both premiered at the MANIFESTE Festival (Paris, 2020) and presented at the ECLAT Festival (Stuttgart, 2021).

Marta Gentilucci’s project at Villa Medici has led her to create a sound-visual installation with American photographer Susan Meiselas. This collaborative project stems from the desire to create the image of an aging woman’s body, seen through our eyes and ears, in the form of “body maps” – tracing a map of skin, wrinkles, expressions that speak of a life lived, still full of energy and possibilities.
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Evangelia Kranioti is a Greek artist and 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’s artistic work embraces photography, film and video installation. Her first feature-length documentary Exotica, Erotica, Etc. (2015 Berlinale Forum) was selected for 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 prizes from the Hellenic Film Academy. His second film Obscuro Barroco (2018 Berlinale Panorama, TEDDY Jury Prize) also won him several awards, including two Iris from 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, his exhibition Les vivants, les morts et ceux qui sont en mer, presented at the 50th Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, was acclaimed by the international press and awarded the Prix Madame Figaro.

Her photographic and film 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.
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Born in 1978 in Pessac (France), Benoît Maire is a visual artist.

After studying philosophy, Benoît Maire obtained his Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique from the Villa Arson in Nice, before completing a research residency at the Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo. Using philosophy, historical texts and artistic references as a starting point, Benoît Maire has developed a polymorphous practice that also takes the form of conferences, publications and curated exhibitions. He regularly collaborates with artists such as Étienne Chambaud, Alex Cecchetti and Falke Pisano.

His research project at Villa Medici is entitled “The hand in painting and printed paper”. His project involves producing a body of work in different media (photography, painting, text, sculpture) that will form an investigation of the transition from the iconic hand of Italian primitivism to the carnal hand of the Renaissance. The hypothesis studied is that the birth of printing at the end of the 15th century contributed to the reformulation of paintings of hands, which lost their power of conceptual designation (deictic) and acquired a more realistic affective weight. Benoît Maire’s work is rooted in this tension, in which the hand searches between two sensitive regimes.
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Curator and critic Julie Pellegrin is interested in the broader notion of performativity. She explores how the relationship between the visual arts, choreography and theatricality affects exhibition writing today. Through exhibitions, research projects and publications (Take Care, The Yvonne Rainer Project, Alfred Jarry Archipelago, Chorégraphier l’exposition, Kapwani Kiwanga, Chantal Akerman, Myriam Lefkowitz, Alex Cecchetti, Marie Preston…), or larger programs (the Performance Day festival, Nuit Blanche 2013, Les Formes du délai), she accompanies often ephemeral practices that raise social, political and ethical questions around issues of relationships and attention.

Julie Pellegrin’s research project at Villa Medici is part of a book she is devoting to performance in contemporary art. In it, she examines current performance politics through the prism of references to post-modern dance, recent developments in performance studies and, more specifically, anarchist theories and practices. In order to explore the hypothesis of a relationship between anarchy and performance, she takes as her starting point a historical moment – the Galleria L’Attico project imagined between 1968 and 1976 by Fabio Sargentini with Simone Forti and performers from Judson Dance and Grand Union – in an attempt to trace a lineage between this revolutionary experience and the current performance scene in Italy. Combining archival exploration, interviews and the organization of public meetings, Julie Pellegrin will carry out speculative and collective research at Villa Medici.
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Born in 1974 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Guy Régis Jr. is a writer and stage director.

Many of his plays, novels and poetry have been translated into several languages. He recently published Les Cinq Fois où j’ai vu mon père (2020) (Gallimard) and the play Goebbels, juif et footballeur (2020) (Les Solitaires Intempestifs) – where his theatrical works also appear. A translator into Creole, Guy Régis Jr. has also made experimental short films. In 2001, he founded the NOUS Théâtre company, which shook up the codes of contemporary theater, notably by creating Service Violence Série (2005), a veritable political and dramaturgical act that laid the foundations of his work. His polymorphous creations are presented in France (Festival Les Francophonies de Limoges, IN du Festival d’Avignon, several Scènes Nationales), Haiti and abroad (USA, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Belgium, Italy, Madagascar, etc.). In addition to his creative work, he is actively involved in the development of the performing arts in Haiti. Guy Régis Jr is currently artistic director of the Festival 4 Chemins.

The writing project he is leading at Villa Médicis questions the display of images of hatred in our contemporary society. An attempt to exhaust all our human conflicts through creation and discussion. For never before has an era placed so much before our eyes both the most hidden forms of family violence and the open wars between the giants of this world. Images of the nuclear threat, terrorist attacks, kidnappings, feminicide, rape, police violence and so on are constantly before us, as if our era were the one that wanted to make them more intimate. Guy Régis Jr wants to create a work that would bring together our daily offenses into a whole, and have them debated in an Agora, a Forum, for an entire day. “What last great conflict to satisfy the hatred between humans?” is the transdisciplinary work he wants to devote himself to composing, as a kind of plural dramaturgy, where the public is invited to continue this debate initiated by Einstein and Freud on this “inevitable” need for fracas and war between humans. Penser/Panser les blessures par la solidarité.
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