Artists in residence

Catherine Umbdenstock lives and works between Paris, Strasbourg, and Berlin. A graduate in directing from the “Ernst Busch” Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, she founded the Epik Hotel ensemble in Strasbourg in 2012. With this company, she has created about ten classical and contemporary repertoire plays.

As an associated artist at La Commune d’Aubervilliers (2014-2017) and then at La Comédie de Colmar, she practices “border-crossing” theater and regularly directs in Germany. She teaches in the Master’s program in Directing in Europe at the University of Lorraine.

With Epik Hotel, she designs and co-facilitates workshops for “distant” audiences, particularly with young actors with disabilities and at the Mulhouse-Lutterbach penitentiary center.

Rosa Maria Unda Souki is a painter and writer of Venezuelan and Brazilian origin. She studied at the Armando Reverón University Institute of the Arts (Caracas, Venezuela) and at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). She resided between 2004 and 2011 in Paris, during which time she won the Jury Prize at the Salon de Montrouge (2011). Her work has also been recognized by the Colas Foundation (Acquisition Prize 2014) and by the Canson Fund (Nominated in 2014). 

Her work focuses on the memory and daily life of the “home” as an intimate space. Her works raise the question of the permanence of spaces and objects and the transience of human presence. During her creative process, she begins with iconographic, bibliographic, historical and photographic research that allows her to immerse herself in her creative subject.

Her work is also rooted in the observation, contemplation and personal and spatial experience of the chosen place, which she transcribes into annotations, sketches and research notebooks prior to creation on the canvas. The elaboration of the pictorial image occurs during this process, which refers not only to the formal experimentation of painting and its materiality, but also to a pre-construction of relationships and meanings around space, its inhabitant and memory beyond cultural or geographical boundaries.

Her work has been exhibited in Paris, Madrid, London, New York and São Paulo. Rosa Maria Unda Souki was invited by the Hermès Foundation to present her project around the Blue House of Frida Kahlo Angle London and Allende at the Atelier Hermès, Seoul, Korea, between December 2017 and February 2018.

INTERVIEW

Graduating from ESAD Reims in 2021, what role did your residency at the Cité internationale des arts play when you left the school?

“Being in residency at the Cité internationale des arts is an opportunity as a young artist. One of the most important roles at the Cité is networking with artists from all walks of life. It has allowed me to make new encounters, to be in contact with diverse backgrounds, practices, experiences and cultures. The permanent immersion with artists or members of the artistic milieu, the availability of a studio in the center of Paris has allowed me to consolidate my practice and my research by offering me such a working environment with multiple resources.”

What projects did you work on during your residency?

“During the residency I was able to work on several projects. This is the way I work. It was an opportunity for me to create a language between sculpture and painting, by inviting a drawn part. My reflections as for these projects were directed towards themes related to the history referring to the myth, to the notion of copy and that of model. It is a questioning on the way we live in the image by referring to the collective or singular memory.”

What are your future projects?

“The Cité internationale des arts has allowed me to engage in new reflections. First step in a long process, it is in the continuitý of the approach undertaken that my future projects oriented towards engraving, sculpture and cartography are oriented. Mixing scientific documentations, generic images from the internet and fiction, I tend to tell other narratives, having as a starting point the Indo-European languages.”

BIOGRAPHY

Solène Untereiner is an artist born in 1998 in Bar-le-duc. She lives and works in Paris.

Through sculpture and painting, Solène Untereiner seeks to extract herself from pre-established photographic frameworks in order to formulate new narratives and new imaginaries. Motivated by the way in which we write the history of individuals, it is under the perspective of the relations of interdependences between the precursor countries of Western civilization and the cradle countries of humanity in the Middle East and Asia that her research is centered. 

Supported during a first artistic residency at La Fileuse de Reims in 2021, her work was recently shown in a group exhibition at Theleftplacetherightplace (Reims) last October, If there is feeling Life in other parts of the universe, there is music too*, then in a group exhibition in March 2022 at 6B (Saint-Denis).