Dineo Seshee Bopape

Artist, South Africa, 1981

Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981, on a Sunday. the Boeing 767 makes its first airflight; Umkonto We Sizwe performs numerous underground assualts against the apartheid state. There was an earthquake that killed maybe 50 people in China; an International NGO Conference on Indigenous Populations and the Land is held in Geneva, The name ‘internet’ is mentioned for the first time; Hosni Mubarack was elected president of Egypt; there is a coup d’etat in Ghana; princess Diana of Britain marries Charles; Bob Marley dies; apartheid SA invades Angola; AIDS is identified/ created/named; Salman Rushdie releases his book “Midnight’s Children”; the remains of the Titanic are found; Muhamed Ali retires; Winnie Mandela’s banishment orders are renewed for another 5 years; the first test tube baby is born, Thomas Sanakara rides a bike to his first cabinet meeting; Machu Pichu is declared a heritage site; her paternal grandmother dies affected by dementia; that very year millions of people cried tears(of all sorts), spoke words in many languages and billions of people dreamt…. somethings continued, somethings transformed others ended(?), The world’s human population was then apparently at around 4.529 billion… today she (Bopape) is one amongst 7 billion – occupying multiple adjectives.” She is the winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017, as well as the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2017. She is represented by the galleries Sfeir-Semler (Beirut) and Bendana Pinel (Paris).

The project: Vibe: Sa lerole ke kosha

Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981, on a Sunday. the Boeing 767 makes its first airflight; Umkonto We Sizwe performs numerous underground assualts against the apartheid state. There was an earthquake that killed maybe 50 people in China; an International NGO Conference on Indigenous Populations and the Land is held in Geneva, The name ‘internet’ is mentioned for the first time; Hosni Mubarack was elected president of Egypt; there is a coup d’etat in Ghana; princess Diana of Britain marries Charles; Bob Marley dies; apartheid SA invades Angola; AIDS is identified/ created/named; Salman Rushdie releases his book “Midnight’s Children”; the remains of the Titanic are found; Muhamed Ali retires; Winnie Mandela’s banishment orders are renewed for another 5 years; the first test tube baby is born, Thomas Sanakara rides a bike to his first cabinet meeting; Machu Pichu is declared a heritage site; her paternal grandmother dies affected by dementia; that very year millions of people cried tears(of all sorts), spoke words in many languages and billions of people dreamt…. somethings continued, somethings transformed others ended(?), The world’s human population was then apparently at around 4.529 billion… today she (Bopape) is one amongst 7 billion – occupying multiple adjectives.” She is the winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017, as well as the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2017. She is represented by the galleries Sfeir-Semler (Beirut) and Bendana Pinel (Paris).

Akram Zaatari

Photographer and video artist, Lebanon, 1966

Born in 1966, Akram Zaatari has produced more than 50 films and videos. These all share an interest in writing histories, pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut’s contemporary art scene. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (1997), he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice. One of the most important artists on the Lebanese scene, having represented Lebanon at the Venice Biennial in 2013, Akram Zaatari is represented by the galleriesSfeir-Semler (Beirut), Thomas Dane (London) and Kurimanzutto (Mexico).

The project: FATHER AND SON

The project FATHER AND SON looks at two archeological missions that took place in Sidon in the mid-nineteenth century and that led to the discoveries of two sarcophagi belonging to a father and a son; kings Eshmouazar II (now in Paris) and Tabnit (now in Istanbul). The project imagines reuniting, possibly in the same space, but maybe symbolically or even virtually, the two sarcophagi through an art work. The project explores alternatives to restitution. This will happen first through 3D scanning, later through printing and hopefully reaching to their display together to tell the story of their separation.

Mohssin Harraki

Artist, Morocco, 1981

Mohssin Harraki, born in Assilah (Morroco) in 1981, is a multidisciplinary artist whose drawings, videos, exhibitions and photographs are all ways of questioning social and political issues. The artist questions both the ways society builds cultural memory and collective imagination. He is interested in the mechanisms of building collective imaginary memories. He is also interested in subjects such as genealogy, the transmission of power and education. His exhibitions explore history, writing and images, notably his exhibition ‘Illusions: the presence of images contribute to their disappearance’ at the Imane Farès Gallery (Paris). His work has been presented in numerous institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France in 2020, the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MECA, Occitane-France in 2020, Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon in 2019, Group exhibition at the Castelli Gallery, New York, United States in 2019, at the Dakar biennial , Senegal in 2018, at the Hessel Museum of Art, at the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea in 2014 and 2013. He presented his project ‘Absence-Presence Twice’ with Joseph Kosuth at the Imane Fares Gallery (Paris). He is represented by the gallery Imane Farès (Paris).

The project: Forbidden image/missing image

My residency project is a research on the birth of the photo, the passage to the image and its circulation. In the project Forbidden Image / Missing Image, I try to question the ban on the image and the degree of lack it produces, while evoking the means of production of the archive and its relationship with History in its Moroccan context and that of Arab countries in general. I am interested in the relationship to the history of the ban on images in the Arab countries, a history to be imagined from words, from the absence, the invisible, the lack of image. Is there a possible encounter with emptiness through words? A missing image is not simply the absence of something that perhaps reveals its real nature, but this absent image as such. Talking about an image through another image without taking an image, for example, taking a picture of a photographer taking a picture of the photographer taking the picture (image), is like talking about the third witness of a photo.

Maya Minder

Artist, Switzerland, 1983

Maya Minder, born in 1983 and lived in Zurich, is a performing artist and feminist, who based her researches into the importance of microbes for daily life and cooking. Her work is about cultivating communities and culinary delights. Similar to the concept of culture, Food has its roots in an agricultural context and now encompasses concepts related to knowledge as one of her research. She has received several awards and nominations : Kadist Award, Pro Helvetia, Pax Award. She has also been exhibited in several international exhibitions and festivals: Ars Electronica, AEGardens2020, Austria, Piksel Spill Fest, Norway, Kunsthalle Zurich, Klöntal-Triennale, Food Culture Days, Swiss. In her work she focuses on food and how we are connected to this world to earthly ways. Food has become essential since it is socio- political and economical interrelated and finally understood as a human cultural heritage and alchemy. Eating as an act of nutrition uptake is not only a physical activity, but also bounds us within a daily rhythm and interspecies and microbial exchange and continues update.

The project: Green Open Food Evolution

With Green Open Food Evolution – A dietary proposal for an endosymbiotic co-evolution to become Homo photosynthetic I want to propose an artist research project for the residency. The Research is open ended and the final result of this research project would be a speculative cooking book on a potential dietary program accompagned by performative lectures, workshops and dinner- performances on the subject of Homo photosynthetic. The project will be developed in collaboration with the interdisciplinary artistic research project « Roscosmoe – The worm that wanted to go into space » initiated by Ewen Chardronnet and the marine biologists Xavier Bailly and Gaëlle Correc (researchers at the Roscoff Biological Station, Finistère – CNRS Sorbonne Université).

Sara Ouhaddou

Artist, France, 1986

Born in France in 1986 to a Moroccan family, Sara Ouhaddou’s artistic practice is influenced by the continuous language of her dual culture. Beginning her career as a fashion designer, she then developed more artistic and social techniques, addressing the challenges faced by Moroccan craftsmen. She used this forum to question the role of art as a tool for economic, social and cultural development, particularly in the Arab world. By sharing her examination of the changes in her cultural background, she juxtaposes traditional Moroccan art with the conventions of contemporary art so as to highlight the realities of forgotten cultures. She has participated in the following exhibitions: Islamic Art festival, Sharjah (2017-2018), Crafts Becomes Mordern, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (2017); the Marrakech Biennale (2016). His monographic exhibitions have been presented at the Moulin d’Art Contemporain de Toulon (2015); Gaité Lyrique, Paris (2014); and the Institut Français de Marrakech (2014). Among the awards she has received: Arab Fund for Art and Culture (2014); and Un Pourcent Art Contemporain NYC, Little Syria Project (2017). She is represented by the gallery Polaris (Paris).

The project: Des Autres

Des Autres is a research project which treats all divine, human and monstrous figures in the culture of the ancient Amazighs* people of North Africa. And in parallel, the typological history of places of knowledge: libraries, media libraries and museums. This geographical crossover study, over time, between Europe and North Africa is intended to allow me to build a work of art as a new physical, ethereal or performance space superimposed on all other knowledge. By highlighting the Amazigh mythology, I question our spaces of learning and knowledge transmission in a wider sense.

Hamedine Kane

Artist, filmmaker, Mauritania, 1983

Hamedine Kane, Senegalese and Mauritanian artist and film director, lives and works between Brussels and Dakar. Through his practice, Kane frequents borders, not as signs and factors of impossibility, but as places of passage and transformation, as a central element in the conception of itinerant identity. He uses words and images to highlight the notions of exile, wandering, and movement but also to replace political time with living time. He developed a strong interest in memory and heritage which reflected in The School of Mutants with Stéphane Verlet-Bottero, a research project that intermingles with the past and the future, transgressing and irrigating the limits of space and time. Kane’s latest works were exhibited at the last Dak’art Biennale under the direction of Simon Njiami, at Documenta 14 :“Every Time A Ear Di Sound” curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio and Marcus Gammel. In 2018 his work was the subject of a solo exhibition in Mumbai at Clark House Initiative, commissioned by Sumesh Sharma with whom he continued a collaboration at The Showroom in London. In 2018 Kane also exhibited at the FIAC and The Colonie in Paris. Kane participated in the TaipeiBiennial 2020, he will be part of the Casablanca Biennale 2021. His film The Blue House received a special mention from the jury at IDFA in Amsterdam in 2020.

The project: Three Americans in Paris

My particular interest for literature and the book as an object, vector for my artistic creation, comes above all from my previous work as librarian in Senegal and Mauritania. This experience was to become an important marker in my artistic development. At the same time, I also developed an interest in the influence that African, Afro-American and African diaspora literature and its authors have, as source of inspiration for current generations in their political social and environmental struggles. The residency will allow me to continue this research and to create a new season of work around this literature. It so happens that the three American writers which with whom I would like to launch this new creative research (Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin), following the series ‘Salesman of Revolt’ (2018), lived in and created the majority of their work in Paris. The work of these three writers was for me a great source of inspiration and comfort during my European exile. I know that they were also a great inspiration to many before me.

Achraf Touloub

Artist, France

Achraf Touloub explores the links between tradition and modern life in a globalised world. His pictorial work brought him to focus on diverse forms of visual art, with an alternative treatment of perspective: a motif of multitude of intersecting lines was born. He is represented by the Belgian gallery Baronian Xippas.

The project: A window for ONE world

For his residential project Art Explora, Achraf Touloub will be developing a new series of drawings and paintings as a starting point to discuss the question of reality in an ever more connected world governed by omnipresent communication technologies. Since starting this journey, the artist has considered initiative and immersive dimensions unique to technology and merged them with traditional forms of representation. This immersive dimension now disrupts the way in which we understand and come to terms with the modern era. So many current events leave the impression that they are choreographed, engulfing us in what seems to be a preordained script. This heady feeling of finding ourselves both actor and spectator in these images is one of the major consequences of communications technologies on our existence. The dizzying feeling we face conduces the artist to invent and experiment with new forms of perception and his attempt to navigate the multiple superimposed dimensions which make up the contemporary world. Achraf Touloub expresses his work with pictographic research and immersive formats, which take the physical representation first and foremost as a carnal and intuitive experience. It is about giving the visual image a function, of generating a space in which we can reconnect with our primal self.

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro

Artist, France

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro is an artist, environmental engineer and curator. He lives and works between Paris and London. His transdisciplinary practice develops collective forms of action and education, linked to the socio-ecological mutations of territories. His work has been presented at the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Taipei Biennale, the Oslo Triennial and various international institutions. In 2018, in Dakar, he initiated in collaboration with Hamedine Kane L'Ecole des Mutants, a collaborative art and research platform focusing on education and political utopia in a postcolonial context.

The project: Small grains cosmology

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro is fascinated by Millet and other ‘grain diets’: for him, these forgotten cereals, left aside on the scrapheap of techno-scientific modernism, embody imperialism, patriarchal oppression a continued resistance to homogenisation. This is also about a resilient plant which, in a drier and less stable climate, could play an important role in improving food sovereignty and the future of agriculture. By sharing the requirements of other ways of looking at the world, his project tries to develop an agricultural universe around Millet, in relation with farming communities which are concerned for their survival. Building on his in-depth survey of interviews and the archives of specialist institutions, his project will include artistic creations, research into sleep and a dining performance.

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Maarten Vanden Eynde

Artist, Belgium, 1977

Maarten Vanden Eynde is a visual artist based in Brussels (Belgium) and Saint-Mihiel (France). He graduated from the free media department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL) in 2000, participated in the experimental MSA Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles (US) in 2006 and finished a post graduate course in 2009 at HISK Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent (BE). His practice is embedded in long term research projects that focus on numerous subjects of social and political relevance such as In 2005 he founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS), an interdependent art initiative that initiates and coordinates events, residencies, research projects and exhibitions worldwide, together with Marjolijn Dijkman.In 2005 he founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS), an interdependent art initiative that initiates and coordinates events, residencies, research projects and exhibitions worldwide, together with Marjolijn Dijkman. post-industrialism, capitalism and ecology. His work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future; sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow. He is represented by the gallery Meessen de Clercq (Brussels).

Oulimata Gueye

Critic and curator, Senegal

Oulimata Gueye is an art critic and curator based in Paris (FR) studying the impact of digital technology on urban popular culture in Africa. Her fields of investigation include the potential of fiction to develop critical analysis and alternative positions. She holds a Master in cultural management delivered by the Paris 8 University, and studied Art and Language the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (FR). From 2020 to 2023 she is the external advisor to Maarten Vanden Eynde’s PhD candidature in the Artistic Research Project ‘Matter, Gesture, Soul’ at the University of Bergen in Norway.

The project: Ars Memoriae

The “Ars Memoriae” project takes as its starting point the little known Mesolithic site of Fontainebleau and is anchored in a broader research on the material forms of memory and the contemporary challenges of archaeology, particularly with regard to the place it has given to the African continent where the oldest remains of human presence on Earth are to be found. By studying different ways of remembering, it will be a question of imagining / speculating on / what could be the material vestiges that would survive contemporary society in order to propose an alternative historical narrative.

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Maarten Vanden Eynde

Artist, Belgium, 1977

Maarten Vanden Eynde is a visual artist based in Brussels (Belgium) and Saint-Mihiel (France). He graduated from the free media department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL) in 2000, participated in the experimental MSA Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles (US) in 2006 and finished a post graduate course in 2009 at HISK Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent (BE). His practice is embedded in long term research projects that focus on numerous subjects of social and political relevance such as In 2005 he founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS), an interdependent art initiative that initiates and coordinates events, residencies, research projects and exhibitions worldwide, together with Marjolijn Dijkman.In 2005 he founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS), an interdependent art initiative that initiates and coordinates events, residencies, research projects and exhibitions worldwide, together with Marjolijn Dijkman. post-industrialism, capitalism and ecology. His work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future; sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow. He is represented by the gallery Meessen de Clercq (Brussels).

Oulimata Gueye

Critic and curator, Senegal

Oulimata Gueye is an art critic and curator based in Paris (FR) studying the impact of digital technology on urban popular culture in Africa. Her fields of investigation include the potential of fiction to develop critical analysis and alternative positions. She holds a Master in cultural management delivered by the Paris 8 University, and studied Art and Language the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (FR). From 2020 to 2023 she is the external advisor to Maarten Vanden Eynde’s PhD candidature in the Artistic Research Project ‘Matter, Gesture, Soul’ at the University of Bergen in Norway.

The project: Ars Memoriae

The “Ars Memoriae” project takes as its starting point the little known Mesolithic site of Fontainebleau and is anchored in a broader research on the material forms of memory and the contemporary challenges of archaeology, particularly with regard to the place it has given to the African continent where the oldest remains of human presence on Earth are to be found. By studying different ways of remembering, it will be a question of imagining / speculating on / what could be the material vestiges that would survive contemporary society in order to propose an alternative historical narrative.

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Mélanie Pavy

Artist and filmmaker, France, 1977

Mélanie Pavy is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. For her first feature film, Cendres (co-directed with Idrissa Guiro and released in theaters in 2015) she will be a resident of the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto for 7 months. In October 2020, as part of the SACRe doctoral program at PSL University, Fémis and the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, she will defend a practical thesis in cinema on life in a degraded world and the perspective of its disappearance. The installations and videos resulting from this work are shown in solo and group exhibitions at the BAL, the Galerie des filles du Calvaire, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Grande Halle de la Villette, 116 in Montreuil and the Fémis. Through her work, she questions our capacity to think and to tell the story of loss, and its ultimate corollary, the end of a human world.

Sophie Houdart

Anthropologist, France, 1971

Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist, research director at CNRS (Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology). Specialising in Japan, she conducted several research programs on the theme of creation and innovation, in the field of science, arts and architecture. Since 2012, she has been investigating life after the triple disaster in the Fukushima region of Japan in March 2011. She is working in collaboration with a hybrid collective, ‘Call It Anything’ which brings together researchers and artists around converging experiments on grief, damaged land, radioactivity and rebuilding what exists.

The project: Fukushima: cover versions

Between excavation and video editing, under the watchful eye of the two tutelaries Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Matsuo Bashô (1644-1694), our project ‘Fukushima: Reprises’ consists of encapsulating the mass of data from our travels in a region so severely hit by the nuclear catastrophe of March 2011 in Japan. By concentrating on what has not been said, what was barely visible but nevertheless noted, what has been sketched out without becoming salient, what persists, finally, once the text has been written and the film shot, we try to understand how common knowledge is woven around a reality that never ceases to escape us and, by reopening the story and risking it in contact with others, once again learn how it can be emphasised and made to endure.

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Mélanie Pavy

Artist and filmmaker, France, 1977

Mélanie Pavy is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. For her first feature film, Cendres (co-directed with Idrissa Guiro and released in theaters in 2015) she will be a resident of the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto for 7 months. In October 2020, as part of the SACRe doctoral program at PSL University, Fémis and the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, she will defend a practical thesis in cinema on life in a degraded world and the perspective of its disappearance. The installations and videos resulting from this work are shown in solo and group exhibitions at the BAL, the Galerie des filles du Calvaire, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Grande Halle de la Villette, 116 in Montreuil and the Fémis. Through her work, she questions our capacity to think and to tell the story of loss, and its ultimate corollary, the end of a human world.

Sophie Houdart

Anthropologist, France, 1971

Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist, research director at CNRS (Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology). Specialising in Japan, she conducted several research programs on the theme of creation and innovation, in the field of science, arts and architecture. Since 2012, she has been investigating life after the triple disaster in the Fukushima region of Japan in March 2011. She is working in collaboration with a hybrid collective, ‘Call It Anything’ which brings together researchers and artists around converging experiments on grief, damaged land, radioactivity and rebuilding what exists.

The project: Fukushima: cover versions

Between excavation and video editing, under the watchful eye of the two tutelaries Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Matsuo Bashô (1644-1694), our project ‘Fukushima: Reprises’ consists of encapsulating the mass of data from our travels in a region so severely hit by the nuclear catastrophe of March 2011 in Japan. By concentrating on what has not been said, what was barely visible but nevertheless noted, what has been sketched out without becoming salient, what persists, finally, once the text has been written and the film shot, we try to understand how common knowledge is woven around a reality that never ceases to escape us and, by reopening the story and risking it in contact with others, once again learn how it can be emphasised and made to endure.

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