Artists in residence

Born in 1988, Isaura Tupiniquim is a Brazilian multi-artist. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in dance from the Federal University of Bahia and is a doctoral student in sociology at the Federal University of Paraíba, where she is conducting research on censorship against artists in Brazil.

Her artistic work focuses on dance, performance and music. It revolves around the relationship between art and politics through the violence exerted on bodies and the possibility of responding to it in an autofictional, feminist, erotic and cyberpunk way.

Her work experiments with sound, voice, body movement and technology. The artist explores instability and constraints as compositional strategies, as well as the cultural and aesthetic contradictions inherent in her name, echoing the multiple tensions present in her country.

Among her main choreographic creations are ISTC – Isaura Suélen Tupiniquim Cruz (2017); Ópera Nuda (2013); Fricção (2011) and Entrada ao Preço da Razão (2007).

In 2020, she made her first audiovisual experiences: Mula [in site-specific] – unique performance (Itaú Cultural Award) and Mula [in site-specific] – second shot. In 2021, she released her first album: Isaura Tupiniquim em Púrpura Ruína. She is currently engaged in the design of a choreographic conference based on her doctoral research.  

Endi Tupja is a filmmaker living between Berlin and Tirana. Her research focuses on experimenting with strategies for recovering memory, representations, and subverted geographies influencing identity and history. She explores the limits of self-representation, as well as its relationship with moving images and filmmaking. There is an omnipresent tension between the essential and exaggeration in her search for clarity. Tupja continuously attempts to challenge a certain idea of institutional formalism established in artistic research and academic language. She employs the (de)spectacularization and disruptive nature of different interdependent and marginalized forms from the southern Mediterranean to reflect on gender, proximity, work, and periphery.

Dato (David) Turashvili is a Georgian fiction writer – author of novels, movie scripts, and plays for theatre.  After graduating from secondary school, he studied literature, film and art history at the universities of Tbilisi, London and Madrid.

His first collection of short stories was published after the restoration of Georgian independence in this time from the soviet empire. Before the liberation, Dato Turashvili was one of the leaders of the student protest movement against the soviet regime in Georgia and for democracy. For this moment, he has published 22 books – among them his bestselling novels, stories and collection of plays. His novels are translated into 21 foreign languages and published in 17 countries and his plays were performed on the stages of the Georgian and not only Georgian theatres. Furthermore, Dato is the author of scientific research letters in literary criticism and historiography. He has translated prosaic and poetic texts from Russian, Spanish and English.

His other interests include traveling in the mountains – He has participated in expeditions to the Caucasus, Andes and Himalayas. Dato Turashvili is a host to the most popular TV shows about books in Georgia. While in residence at the Cité internationale des arts, Dato started writing a new book about French-Georgian relations – it will be a mixed novel of fiction and documentary.

Alex Turgeon’s work braids images of architecture, infrastructure, and nature to become uncanny translations of the intersecting experience of queer subjectivity, social class, and urban space under late capitalism. His artistic practice operates at the intersection of poetic language and architectural metaphor. Through an investigation in these corresponding forms, Turgeon explores how poetic structures and architectural aesthetics can interpret queer experience as a form of built environment. This environment operates as sculpture, installation, assemblage, concrete poetry, video and drawing, embodying a radical ethos rooted in the historical methodologies of printed matter—framed as a distributive tool and political method for making and occupying space. His current research, pedagogy and exhibition projects critically interpret the utopian impulse within queer methodology and architectural theories.