Liv Schulman

Born in 1985, Liv Schulman grew up in Buenos Aires, where she attended public school. Fascinated by television, the arrival of cable in 1990 and the financial crash of 2001 are among the most significant moments in her life. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, she has lived in France since 2015. Liv Schulman’s work takes the form of filmed fictions, TV series, readings-performances and novel writing. The discourses at the heart of her work deal with the place of subjectivity in the political space and the difficulty of giving it credence. For example, she shows a real telenovela on television as if it were a museum. In her approach, to create means to directly experience an environment, a system, a subject. Her work has been exhibited at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris, the CAC La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Crac Alsace, the Steirischer Herbst festival in Austria, the Fondation Ricard in Paris, the SMK in Copenhagen, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska. She has benefited from the ADAGP grant, the patronage of the Fondation des Artistes, the DAAD residency program in Germany, and was awarded the Prix Ricard in 2018.

At Villa Medici, Liv Schulman would like to develop research into Luigi Pirandello’s anti-theatrical work and its relationship to the madness of his wife Maria Antonietta Portulano. Considering that Pirandello’s work is strongly influenced by his wife’s axiomatic becoming, she would like to propose an approach to this research linked to institutional psychotherapy. Her project, entitled “Anti-theatre, anti-psychiatry, institutional psychotherapy and an Opera-T-shirt in Pirandello’s Rome”, is based on this research, and involves dramaturgical work around and in the Rome of Portulano-Pirandello, using the city as a theatrical or cinematographic stage. In this setting, an opera-film unfolds, with anonymous tourists wandering around the city. They move about wearing T-shirts bearing axioms, creating a choreography of metalanguage.