Artists in residence

Emma Charrin is a French photographer based in Paris. She graduated from the Master of Fine Arts at the University of Aix-en-Provence (2010), then continued her artistic studies at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée and completed a degree in Cinema at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2012). 

Her work has been exhibited in France and abroad, in art centers, art galleries and photography festivals. Her works are part of the collections of the Musée Les Franciscaines in Deauville or La Villa Noailles in Hyères. In 2021, she presents her first solo show Edifice Désert at the art center La Plate-Forme, in Dunkerque. She is the winner of the Grand Prix du Jury de photographie of the 36th International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories of the Villa Noailles. 

As an artist photographer, her taste for painting and cinema leads her to question the fabrication of representation and imagination. She thus uses the codes of cinema, such as the off-camera or the facsimile and develops a photographic practice of staging where the place of man in his environment is questioned in a quasi-allegorical way, through the prism of metamorphosis. Photography becomes a material-image that opens up to video, engraving, silk-screening, but also to installation and publishing. 

Emma Charrin’s research is focused on the question of landscape and its representation, fascinated by the transfiguration of raw materials. She then turns to territories in transformation where she explores the notion of entropy. The work of investigation, the archives of the territory, the encounters, the excavation are backed up by locations and structure her approach. Through a documentary and conceptual approach to photography, she explores the boundaries between reality and fiction. The space is questioned as a vector of fiction in which she initiates a process of theatricalization between individuals who become characters and a place that becomes a set. 

In this spirit, she leads in collaboration since 2010 with Olivier Muller, dancer and choreographer, the project Des Rives-Provisoire, which takes shape on the Mediterranean rim. The duo joins in the fictional creation of false rituals between reactivation of myths and science fiction. Their work is expressed through different mediums (photography, film, installation in the landscape, editions) and oscillates between image production and performative practices.

INTERVIEW

A residency in Montmartre, at the Cité internationale des arts, how is it?

“In the evening, sometimes I look out my window and see the lights on in the other studios. It can be midnight, two hours, sometimes four. The residents are busy while the others are asleep. There is a very special emotion to feel this nocturnal proximity, these lives that are also acts and works that are done. Looking out the window, I feel like I’m looking at an islet, a bit like James Stewart in Window to Courtyard, which looks at all the stories that are possible in this little corner of the city.

In the Cité, we are in the city and out of the city. We meet the other residents, we discuss projects, upcoming exhibitions. We also often talk about the Cité itself, about how we should live here, together, about recycling and compost that we should finally install, about our huts.

I wonder what a city would be like without this type of insularity.”

What are your current projects?

“I am preparing an installation called Terre Seconde on artificial intelligence and extinction at the Palais de Tokyo as part of the Audi Talents, which will open on June 20.

I am also working on the deployment in Greater Paris and on the architectural scale of L’augmentation des villes in collaboration with designer Goliath Dyèvre and with the help of Icade.

I am currently developing a virtual reality installation with Ruedi Baur as part of a research project at ENSAD.

Then other projects, probably in New York, Gijón, Brussels, Taiwan.  

I am also writing a book between theory and fiction on artificial imagination that will close my research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris.”

BIOGRAPHY

After studying visual arts and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then multimedia at ENSBA, Grégory Chatonsky developed a work around the Internet.

Technologies, and in particular the Internet, are an important source of inspiration for Gregory Chatonsky. Shaping the paradoxes of the network and the gaps between its technological and existential flows could summarize a research that spreads over several media: installation, video, photography, writing, drawing and sculpture. His works could evoke infinite spaces in which attention is fragmented. The network becomes a world in its itself where the boundaries between technology and the human being become blurred. His practice attempts to draw the outlines of a new imaginary whose invention would be technical and which could go as far as the extinction of the human being.

In 1994, Grégory Chatonsky founded “Incident.net”, one of the first Netart collectives in France. He has been a guest professor at Le Fresnoy (2004-2005), at UQAM (2007-2014), and is the recipient of an international research chair at the University of Paris VIII (2015). Since 2017, he has been an artist-researcher at the ENS Ulm and co-directs with Béatrice Joyeux-Purnel a research seminar on artificial imagination and post-digital aesthetics.

Born into a family of recognized artists in Raiatea (French Polynesia), Evrard CHAUSSOY has been naturally immersed in art since his birth. Growing up on his island, the artist developed a vision of the world that is his own and that he translates into his paintings with representative colors, worked light, marked by a family historical background to convey an important message.

During his residency, his painting moved away from the figurative towards a more conceptual and, above all, more committed form. Using an ancestral Polynesian technique, he ended up with a more contemporary freedom of gesture.

On canvas, Evrard explores the traditional methods of painting on sarongs, made from woodcuts, then altering, erasing or covering these prints, leaving only a trace. He reinterprets the forms of the early Polynesian arts, gradually deconstructing them to leave only the evidence of a past existence.

At the heart of his approach, the notion of culture is closely intertwined with that of nature. These notions are threatened by a constantly changing world. As a result, his creations are anchored in a temporality that is both past and present, inviting the observer to question their future and the role he or she can play in this ever-changing world.