Artists in residence

Hidden behind the three thick roots of the Aristotelian poetic genres’ family tree; the tragedy, comedy and the epic, one finds their often-forgotten sibling, the parody. Scarcely addressed by Aristotle himself, at least in the surviving literature, the French literary critic Gérard Genette sat out to reclaim the parody into the literary fold with his 1982 seminal work Palimpsests: La Littérature au second degré. Genette presupposes two modes of production that engenders parody, namely imitation and transformation, and it is the latter which seems to best describe the process behind Axel Gouala’s metamorphic sculptural objects.

Where Ulysses recalls the Odyssey, or plaster copies their marble originals, Axel Gouala humorously transforms materials much more familiar to the denizens of the 21st century: plungers playing palms, palms playing coatracks, a mop turned snake slithering away from its bucket.

It is precisely the intimacy with which we greet these familiar materials and made-to-be-held design objects that makes the viewing of Axel Gouala’s works an almost haptic affair.

– Extract, text by Gustav Elgin, Be Magazine 28, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Benjamin Goubet was born in 1995. He graduated from HEAD – Geneva in 2021, and lives and works between Paris and Geneva .
 

His film work explores the melancholy of cities, portraying nihilistic youths doomed to an inescapable fate. Within this melancholy vision of the contemporary, he infuses the imagination produced by his generation, bringing the poetic and the fantastic into suffocatingly realistic worlds. In this way, he achieves a rare blend of formalism and emotion. He works on waiting rather than action, using the time of inaction to capture presences.
 

His film Anabase (2021) has attracted attention at a number of international festivals, including Winterthur, Côté Court and San Sebastian IFF, where it won a special mention from the jury. 
He is currently developing a digital film project, SkyGirls, which won the Upcoming Lab prize at the Solothurn Film Festival.

Sylvain Gouraud is a photographer and video artist, born in 1979 and based in Aouste-sur-Sye in the Drôme region. He immerses himself in territories where man organizes his practices in such a way as to negotiate his place among living beings, both human and non-human, working with relevant actors in order to build an accurate representation of complex issues.

His work takes the form of books, encounters, and exhibitions that associate photography, sound and video and has been exhibited in various museums such as the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, and the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. His collaborative practice extends to the territories that he activates, including a psychiatric hospital in Alsace, a prison in the île-de-France region, and rural areas such as Go-Co village in Vietnam or Majastres located in the Alpes de Haute Provence.

He has previously been awarded a grant from the Ateliers Medicis/CNAP program Les regards du grand Paris for his project Un ensemble and has recently completed a short film entitled d’ici, de là that was made during a residency at the Pays-Centre-Ouest-Bretagne as part of the Pompidou Center’s hors les murs program. His photographs feature in the collections of the Cnap, the Frac Alsace, and the Frac Essonne.