Artists in residence

Cécile Granier de Cassagnac defines herself first and foremost as a painter. The inspiration for her work comes from living things (animals, humans, plants, minerals), only to detach herself from them.

She has developed a visual language based on her travels and artist residencies abroad, and on her gleaning of images and objects. These journeys and objects are curiosities that reappear in her paintings in the form of liquid memories, blurred and coloured on paper. A place where the randomness of watercolour attempts to capture the reverie.

Born in Paris in 1979, she lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the Beaux Arts de Paris in 2007, and has spent time at the Sydney College of the Arts (2006), at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi as part of a workshop residency in partnership with the Institut Français (2010), and as a winner of the Yishu 8 prize in Beijing (2011), as well as in Togo, in Lomé (2013) and in Jordan, in Petra.

Thomas Garnier is a contemporary artist from the world of architecture. After a State graduation in 2016, he followed the complementary training of the Fresnoy – Studio National des arts Contemporains, from which he graduated with honours for his work on the installation “Cénotaphes”. The latter also won the ADAGP Special Mention Digital Art Revelation Award.

A renewal of a form of post-digital romanticism, his installations and photographs question the essence of the local, history and memory in the progressive establishment of a globalized and desensitized world. There are cold automatons that build and deconstruct endlessly devastated concrete landscapes, counterfeit Eiffel towers lost in the mists of the Chinese suburbs, remains of burnt-out cars evolving into hybrid vegetable shapes…

This kaleidoscope of forms and images constitutes a research cluster to identify intangible “other spaces” where it is not clear whether reality is collapsing or being constructed: heterotopias.

Francesca Garolla studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and graduated in directing at the Paolo Grassi Academy of Dramatic Arts in Milan. 

A playwright, actress and author, Francesca Garolla is currently associate artist and co-artistic director at the Teatro i of Milan. At the same time, she is developing her writing, anchored in political reflection and characterized by a great attention to language. Her theatre draws from reality the poetic elements that question notions of individual and collective freedom and responsibilities.

Many of her plays have been translated into French with the help of the Maison Antoine Vitez and have been presented in France during staged readings.

Hosted three times in residence at La Chartreuse, two of her texts were selected for the Rencontres d’été during the Avignon Festival. Her latest project, Tu es libre, was a finalist in the Premio Riccione (2017), the highest distinction for Italian theatre, and selected by the reading office of the Comédie Française (2018). It is also translated into English and published by Cue Press in Italian and French. It is currently one of the ten Italian authors selected by the European Fabulamundi Playwriting project.

INTERVIEW

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

“It’s ideal, I feel really privileged. Being in residence in Montmartre, at the Cité internationale des arts, means benefiting from the advantages of the countryside, the calm, the nature and the cultural effervescence of Paris, the events and the programming of the place that matter to me.

It is therefore the perfect setting to work, get inspired, follow the news, continue my work, meet people, make appointments in my workshop and present my latest drawings.”

A few words to tell us about your next exhibition at the Cité?

“My next exhibition will be held at the Petite Galerie de la Cité internationale des arts. As I write these few lines, it is still in preparation. For this occasion I have the opportunity to work with the independent curator Agnès Violeau. For the moment I can tell you that the exhibition will be entitled: Étant donné la situation nous ne changerons rien. 

Among other things, I will present a set of large-format drawings from my long-short series: L’office du dessin. 

I have been working on this series since 2016, it can be technically summarized in an aesthetic synthesis constrained by the grid of paper, such as an accounting card. Since a few months I have been using my own paper made especially for the needs of this protocol.

The grid constraint gives me a lot of freedom to develop my ideas. These are in turn, squeaky, frontal, humorous, they tend to question our time and our society.”

BIOGRAPHY

More than a shift between low and high culture, it is more a question here of borrowing representations offering the exquisite corpse or games of reversal of interpretation.

An ironic gleaner and observer of society, Olivier Garraud claims the analogical and low tech relationship to the world around him as a sardonic way of looking at it. Gladly squeaky, his productions contribute to the generalized diversion of signs borrowed from reality as well as from a media and contemporary sphere.

While such work is partly nourished by the extensive use of the pencil, he develops prisms and compiles icons through animated sequences, mixed installations or wall hangings.