Artists in residence

Lucie Laflorentie was born in 1983, she lives and works in the Occitan region. Graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, she obtained her DNSEP Art in 2008.

The artist’s work is based on the articulation between her approach to drawing and her experience of landscape. Nourished by a deep attachment to the peasant world that she comes from – a world based on respect for the earth, where tools and manual work occupy a central place – the artist activates during her residencies her strong interest in the material, and tries to measure her research on the scale of a territory, its geology, its history.

In 2019, Lucie Laflorentie was awarded a grant from the Aide à la Mobilité de la région Occitanie and completed a three-month residency at Galerie Mayeur Projects in the United States in the landscapes of New Mexico. This will be followed by a solo exhibition, CATCH THE DUST.

Impelled by the network Air de Midi and La Maison Salvan, she is carrying out a research residency at the Cube Independent Art Room in Rabat (Morocco) in September 2019, and will return in February 2021 thanks to the AIC. Winner of the project Le 1% artistique, for the construction of a high school in the Occitan region, she is deepening her research work around the material and is preparing a sculptural ensemble combining the Grand Antique marble of Aubert and ceramics. 

Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, born in 1992 in Arles and currently based in Marseille, is a French artist who graduated from the École supérieure d’art & de design Marseille-Méditerranée.

In his practice, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan seizes upon small objects masquerading as mundane, quotidian, contemporary and above all apolitical. A tonic bottle or a tracksuit rolled up at the ankle. Shopping trolleys and caravan car windows. The work that he develops around these objects however undermines their claim to be anodyne; they become bearers of colonial histories and geopolitical complexes.

The tonic bottle contains quinine, made up of cinchona, a plant from Peru, brought to Europe by Spanish Jesuits in the 17th century, it ends up in British India, and subsequently becomes a permanent fixture in bars, destined for drinking, not for thinking its history. The rolled-up tracksuit is an allusion to the slave’s ball and chain, now adopted and denatured from such contexts, sartorial experiments borrowed from the world of rap. Revealing the violent histories lodged in such commodities or customs however is not moralising, rather, his work softly peels away their “naturalised” state and discloses something with both wry humour and dead seriousness.

But to tell such stories you have to encounter those who want to listen. His collages, films, installations, found objects and images often tend towards sparseness, a mere invitation for the spectator too to pursue the associated histories of that which is depicted or represented. The installation Dead Park (2021) features an accumulation of found objects, hostile forms masquerading as a children’s playground, the apparently dispassionate configuration giving way to a reflection on the early introduction of forms of control, the birthing of pathologies. Non-Lieu (2017-ongoing) is a minimalist memorial, listing the names of those who have died at the hands of the police in France, a new page added each year.

– Jess Saxby