Émilie Houssa (Coming soon)

Émilie Houssa (1983) is an art historian. She has taught art history and semiology in Montreal and Paris. She now co-directs the Centre Claude Cahun pour la photographie contemporaine in Nantes with Yolande Mary. She is also a novelist. Her first novel La Nuit passera quand même was published by Denoël in 2018, her second La Possibilité du jour by Editions de l’Observatoire (2020) and Pocket (2021). She also writes short stories and critical texts for visual artists and photographers such as Juliette Agnel (Aux étoiles le poids de la terre, éditions Contrejour), Anthony Guerrée (Les Assises du temps perdu, éditions Bouclard).

Her project at Villa Medici
Emilie Houssa’s residency will be devoted to research for the writing of her third novel: fiction set at the turn of the 16th century. In the 19th century, these years are considered to mark the transition from the first so-called Florentine Renaissance to the Roman “High Renaissance”. The novel is set at this turning point, when two visions of art clash. On the one hand, art becomes a refuge from the brutality of the world. On the other, images serve the vision of the powerful, tracing the contours of the body politic we know today: a society smoothed by the images it sends back to itself.

Portrait © Mathias Guigon