Pierre Sintès

Pierre Sintès (b. 1972, France), a certified geography teacher and former member of the French School of Athens, teaches social and political geography at Aix-Marseille University. His work focuses on the relationship between identity and territory in the Balkan countries and the Mediterranean region. For several years, he has been dedicated to experimenting with innovative formats that bring together artists and researchers to explore issues of memory, power, and public space. He is the author of *A Geopolitical Atlas of the Balkans* (Autrement 2016), *Geopolitics of Conflicts* (Bréal 2016), as well as *Monument in Motion* (Gli Ori 2020) and *Art, Memory, Public Space (MF 2022).

Pierre Sintès’s residency aims to explore the realm of conflicting memories through the tangible forms by which these memories are inscribed in space. The stay at the French Academy in Rome will provide an opportunity to examine how certain artistic practices can bring to light marginalized and subaltern histories through the attachments and tensions linked to places, which are difficult to grasp using academic tools alone. To this end, he will draw on observations of these practices within the Roman and Italian context, marked by debates over monuments and colonial legacies, as well as current tensions surrounding the political uses of the fascist past.