Artists in residence

Steeve Verin, born in Guadeloupe in 1991, is a painter and illustrator who graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’art décoratif de Limoges (ENSA).

In the tradition of Rebeyrolle and Bacon, Steeve Verin represents human faces with distorted features, colored and blurred portraits that create a link between presence and absence. They are the result of buried memories, hidden as a kind of reminiscence. These hideous faces show a reality buried under appearance, faces where all harmony rendered by the regularity of the lines disappears to leave place to contours in deliquescence, as if liquefying like deforming mirrors. The fundamental question for the artist is: are we free to show ourselves as we are?

Steeve Verin questions his relationship to otherness and to the world, but also his relationship to himself. He tries to reveal the feeling of inadequacy stemming from the glance of the other, but also the feeling of incomprehension in front of what the other lets us see of himself.

With his work, the artist also questions the veracity images. Isn’t our image polished by the diktats of society? How can we see beyond what we want to show? What if everything was only a matter of appearance? What if everything was all staged?

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro is a curator, artist and environmental engineer. He lives and works between Paris and London. His transdisciplinary practice develops collective forms of action and education in relation to the socio-ecological mutations of territories.

His work has been presented at the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Taipei Biennale, the Oslo Triennial and in various international institutions. In 2018, in Dakar, he has initiated in collaboration with the artist Hamedine Kane l’École des Mutants, a collaborative art and research platform on education and political utopia in a postcolonial context.

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro is fascinated by millet and other “small grains”: for him, these forgotten cereals, discarded by techno-scientific modernity, embody a continuous resistance to homogenization, imperialism and patriarchal oppression. It is also a resilient plant that, in an increasingly dry and unstable climate, could play a key role in the future of agriculture and enhance food sovereignty. Advocating alternative worldviews, his project attempts to develop an agrocosmology of millet, in connection with peasant communities concerned with their survival. Based on an in-depth investigation by interviews and with archives of specialised institutions, his project will include a plastic creation, somatic research and a dinner-performance.

Born in 1981 in Leuven, Belgium, Els Vermang is an artist and curator who lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. 

Her artistic work questions contemporary aesthetics and semiotics, from an algorithmic and conceptual point of view. Her curatorial work extends this investigation, crossing different generations and establishing a dialogue between traditional and experimental art.

The project ‘Ω’ contemplates the topology of space. Topology is a branch of mathematics that deals with properties describing how a space is composed and how it is preserved when deformed. This topic, which has a mathematical, quantum physical and philosophical dimension, originated with Euclid and deals with the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite. Since light always travels in a straight line, it always returns to its starting point within this space and causes light reflections; the so-called cosmic folds and reflections. ‘Ω’ contemplates these cosmic folds and reflections by means of a series of simple tessellations of the two-dimensional grid and its transpositions into complex three-dimensional motifs. This abstract geometric form language is inspired by the surface of the grid and the process of folding and knotting. Aesthetics and technology are thus inextricably linked, and ‘Ω’ is part of an investigation into the logical control of a design process in order to achieve an objective aesthetic result.