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water as told by artists
04.10.2024 - 13.01.2025
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.
“Mermaids are part of our feminist history, and losing sight of this belonging leads us to consider them without correlating them to gender, species, race, humanity, (…) Mermaids force us to pay attention to the question of becoming, to that of life in threads 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 political, artistic, academic and, above all, ethical direction: becoming-sirens are intimately linked to our futures and to the reinvention of the subject in the age of our tragic ecologies”.
Laure Prouvost (b. Croix, France, 1978)
Yiannis Maniatakos (b. Flomohori, Greece, 1935)
Monira Al Qadiri (b. Dakar, Senegal, 1983)
Simone Fattal (b. Damascus, Syria, 1942)
Kusukazu Uraguchi (b. Shima, Japan, 1922)
Mounir Ayache (b. 1991), (resident 2022-2023)
Chiyuki Sakagami (b. Hyogo, Japan, 1961)
Himali Singh Soin (b. India, 1987)
Emilija Škarnulytė (b. Vilnius, Lithuania, 1987)
Aïcha Snoussi (b. Tunis, Tunisia, 1989)
Dala Nasser (b. Tyr, Lebanon, 1990)
Valentin Noujaïm (b. France, 1991), (resident 2023) and Maïa Tellit Hawad (b. France)
Pamela Rosenkranz (b. Uri, Switzerland, 1979)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. Braddock, Pennsylvania, USA,1982)
Bassem Saad (b. Beirut, Lebanon)
Alix Boillot (b. Paris, France, 1992), (resident 2023-2024)
Bianca Bondi (b. Johannesburg, South Africa, 1986), (resident 2024-2025)
Gaëlle Choisne (b. Cherbourg, France, 1985)
Jumana Emil Abboud (b. Nazareth, 1971)
Klodin Erb (b. Winterthur, Switzerland, 1963)
Ariana Papademetropoulos (b. Los Angeles, California, USA, 1990)
Raffaela Naldi Rossano (b. Naples, Italy, 1990)
Rose-Lynn Fisher (b. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 1955)
Younes Ben Slimane (b. Tunis, Tunisia, 1992), (resident 2024)
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. Istanbul, Turkey, 1984)
Alex Cecchetti (b. Terni, Italy, 1977)
Estrid Lutz (b. France, 1989)
Lou Masduraud (b. Montpellier, France, 1990)
Madison Bycroft (b. Kaurna Country, Australia, 1987), (resident 2023-2024)
Self-guided tours
Date: from October 4, 2024 to January 13, 2025
Opening hours: 10am to 7pm daily except Tuesday (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 12pm
January – Sundays 5 at 12pm Price: 14€ / 11€ / 5€
Language: Italian
Family visits
Date: from October 12, 2024 Times:
– In Italian: every Saturday at 3:00 pm
– In French: every Saturday at 4:30 pm
Price: 7€.
Born in 1973, Sam Stourdzé is a specialist in the contemporary image and the relationship between art, photography and cinema. He has curated numerous exhibitions and written several reference works. A former resident of the Académie de France in Rome – Villa Médicis in 2007 in the cinema section, Sam Stourdzé was director of Les Rencontres d’Arles from 2014 to 2020, after having directed the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, between 2010 and 2014 and been editor-in-chief of the photography magazine ELSE. In his six years at the helm of Rencontres d’Arles, he has organized 225 exhibitions, celebrated the festival’s 50th anniversary in 2019, launched a Chinese version of the festival in Xiamen (Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival) and designed the new Institut pour la Photographie in Lille with the Hauts-de-France region. At Rencontres d’Arles, he is committed to breaking down the barriers between photography and other disciplines: contemporary art, music, cinema, architecture and literature.
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Caroline Courrioux is head of Production of the Exhibitions and Cultural events at Villa Medici since 2021. Specializing in aesthetics and visual studies, she works on the links between contemporary art, ecofeminisms and political imaginaries. She previously supported artists and exhibition projects as production manager of the Rencontres d’Arles (France).