Alain Damasio

Winner of three Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire awards, Alain Damasio is a leading French science fiction writer who has enjoyed considerable critical and public success. He rose to prominence with his novel La Horde du Contrevent (2004), translated into Italian, and Les Furtifs, a fantastical novel with strong political undertones in which he invents an animal species capable of escaping human detection. A creator of worlds for video games, cinema, TV series, and theater, he regularly brings his own texts to the stage in concert. In 2021, he created a zone of social, terrestrial, and enchanted experimentation (Zeste) in the Alps, where our sensitive and artistic connections to the forces of life are collectively explored through workshops and seminars.

Thinking about the Villa Medici in terms of its past seems obvious. Imagining it and conjugating it in the future tense, simple or past, is the challenge Alain Damasio has set himself for his October residency. What will become of the bedrooms, living rooms, loggia, and piazzale, which will invade the basements and galleries, inhabit the rooftops? Who will be the residents of 2080, if any remain? Who will lodge there? What ghosts, creatures, organic statues, biopunk artists, extraordinary, radiant, and autonomous works will be found there? What will become of the gardens, what agriculture will take root there, to raise whom and what, what forest perhaps, what urban, Dadaist inscription of the domain in a metamorphosed Rome?

In the form of literary fiction, traced along a narrative line, with some humor, Alain Damasio will recount and give voice to Villa 2080, halfway between credible prototopia and real-fantastik, during a reading.