Paris des vi(ll)es | Public Intimacies

This exhibition is part of the Festival d’Automne 2025.

Paris des Vi(ll)es | Public Intimacies is an in situ artists’ residency running from August to December 2025, an exhibition (from 8 October 2025 to 24 January 2026) and a series of performances on 8, 9 and 10 October.

The co-curators have invited around thirty artists and thinkers (both current and former residents of the Cité) to design a collective project, a platform for exchange that is open to contributions and collaboration between artists of different origins, generations and practices. This project will establish a dialogue with the neighbourhood surrounding the Cité and with the Cité (which is a neighbourhood in itself). The guest artists come from a wide range of backgrounds and practices, but all share an interest in the environment and in establishing a dialogue with local residents. For this project, they will be working in situ on the basis of their own experience. The residency period will therefore produce the content of the exhibition, while enabling everyone to make the place their own, immerse themselves in the neighbourhood and meet the people who live there. The curators will concentrate on the form of what is being invented: links, relationships, questions, stories, performances, films, installations and events etc, focussing on their generosity and accessibility.

On the occasion of the Cité’s sixtieth anniversary, the Scénos are launching a new residency bringing together some thirty artists. During the residency, participants will open up spaces for conversation, creation, improvisation and reflection around the following question: Is Paris a hospitable city and how do artists from around the world – including many residents of the Cité – actually experience the French capital?

Beneath its apparent simplicity, this question touches on what cities are becoming today, on how they are becoming, in the words of AbdouMaliq Simone, infrastructures of persons. It addresses the history of Paris and all that the city represents in the popular imagination, the central role of the Cité internationale des arts and the presence of the Seine. It probes what a public space is today, the various ways of inhabiting and experiencing the city (whether as an insider or outsider) and the ways of thinking, imagining and controlling it when organising a shared space. This simple question actually opens up a multitude of issues and strata that are far from insignificant.
The Curatorial Team

Public events will punctuate the key stages of the process: the Open Studios on Wednesdays in September and a series of events on 8, 9 and 10 October in several neighbouring urban locations and at the Cité. These events will bring the residency to a close and inaugurate the exhibition, which has been devised as a direct extension of the process, both as a space for shared reflection and a record of the experiments, questions and hypotheses that emerged during the residency. The idea is not to imagine a sustainable urban space, but rather to make tangible a few lines of tension, a few speculative and joyful possibilities and other unforeseen things that the artists will choose to recount.

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

5:30 p.m. | Léonce Noah, Ku-J’É Que reste-t-il… (What remains…)
↘ Performance (30 mins)
-> Place du Bataillon-Français-de-l’ONU-en-Corée

6 p.m. | Opening -> Galerie

7 p.m. | Sello Pesa, C’est dur ici (It’s hard here)
↘ Performance (30 min) -> Main courtyard

8 p.m. | Scénos Urbaines archive videos
↘ Screening (60 min) -> Auditorium

Thursday, 9 October 2025

5:30 p.m. | Mega Mingiedi, Kinshasa-Paris
↘ Performance activation (30 min)
-> Galerie — Room 4

6 p.m. | Kristina Solomoukha & Paolo Codeluppi & Barbara Manzetti
Big gestures for small things
↘ Performance activation (15 min)
-> Square Albert Schweitzer
10 Rue de l’Hôtel de ville, 75004 Paris

6:30 p.m. | Léonce Noah, Ku-J’É Que reste -t-il…
↘ Performance (30 min) -> Main courtyard

7 p.m. | Sello Pesa, C’est dur ici
↘ Performance (30 min) -> Place Saint-Paul

8 p.m. | Archival videos from Scénos Urbaines
↘ Screening (60 min) -> Auditorium

Friday, 10 October 2025

4 p.m. | Exchange between Nadia Beugré and Léonce Noah moderated by Jean-Christophe Lanquetin
↘ Discussion (60 min) -> Auditorium

5 p.m. | Jesu, Le Fil
↘ Performance (30 min) -> Voie Georges Pompidou

5:30 p.m. | Djodjo Kazadi
↘ Performance (30 min) -> Main courtyard

6:30 p.m. | Kristina Solomoukha, Paolo Codeluppi & Barbara Manzetti,
Grands gestes pour de petites choses
↘ Performance activation (30 min)
-> Galerie — Room 1

7:30 p.m. | MASIKA
↘ DJ set (60 min) -> Main courtyard