Artists in residence

INTERVIEW

As part of your residency at the Cité internationale des arts, in partnership with the Fondation Culture & Diversité, you received creative support from independent curators who are members of C-E-A / Association française des commissaires d’exposition. Can you tell us how this support has nurtured your practice?

Working with the curators gave me an insight into the issues involved in building an exhibition and producing a video as part of an exhibition, which was very new to me and opened up a lot of possibilities for my practice. The support I received consisted mainly of planning the exhibition Faire danser les ours, presented as part of the Festival des Traversées de Marais. The particularity of this work was that we were thinking about the exhibition at the same time as I was producing the objects that would be shown there. This of course fed a lot into my production; I was able to concentrate on very concrete questions, such as what is going to exist and how, which enabled me to clarify my intentions in a more general way. I really appreciated that, especially as I’d never had the opportunity before to see a personal project through to final production with other highly qualified professionals.

You will be opening an exhibition at the Cité internationale des arts in September 2023 to coincide with the Traversées du Marais festival. How did this project develop and how does it fit in with your residency project?

“My residency project involved producing installations based on a film project, intended more for the cinema, about language and love stories. For two years I filmed the speech and gestures of children in nursery and primary schools in Paris to deal with this subject. My approach is more of a documentary. Last year, while I was taking part in a writing residency at Périphérie, the form I was developing, both in terms of the narrative and the experience I wanted to convey, gradually led me towards installation. This is what I wanted to explore during my residency at the Cité des Arts. The exhibition project fitted in perfectly with my research at the time: how to produce videos for an exhibition space, how to think about the editing in the space, via several screens, and the possibility of wandering around.

I spent some time going back over the filmed images and recorded sounds, as well as the various objects I had collected in the leisure centres: drawings, photos, love notes and letters. I had to sort through all this vast material. Then I experimented with arrangements using video editing, while at the same time exploring ways of projecting in space and onto different media”.

Do you have any other current or future projects?

“I’d obviously like to continue with this project and give a final form to both the installations and the film. At the same time, other projects are gradually coming to a conclusion. I’ve been working on a series of photographs with three social science researchers from the Institut Convergence Migration on the complexities of living in exile. Most of the photographs were taken with a view camera and depict the various ‘welcoming’ or supposedly hospitable structures in the city, both intimate indoor spaces and public outdoor spaces. This work will be exhibited in October at the Maison de l’Architecture in Paris. Finally, I’m in the process of finishing a video installation that will be shown at the Maison Salvan in Toulouse, also in October, as part of the exhibition L’eau qui fend la pierre avec l’herbe by David Ryan. It is conceived as an encyclopaedia of everyday gestures of care and attention practised in Belfast, mainly by people who identify themselves as women. These gestures are a legacy of ways of resisting and fighting that are often hushed up and devalued. By archiving them, I wanted to show their power and their particularity: I was lucky enough to work with Oona Doherty to interpret certain gestures.”

BIO

Ninon Lacroix is a photographer and filmmaker. She took part in the Equal Opportunities programme at ENS Louis-Lumière in 2017, when she was about to complete her degree in Philosophy at PSL / Lycée Henri IV – ENS Ulm. She went on to study for a Master’s degree in Photography at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière, specialising in Alternative Processes, Animating the Still Image and Portraits with a Photographic Camera, graduating in 2022. She completed this course with a Master’s degree in Creative Documentary, specialising in Filmmaking, which was the result of a partnership between the École documentaire de Lussas and Université Grenoble Alpes. During her studies, Ninon Lacroix received grants from the Fondation Culture & Diversité and Prime Video.
 

Ninon Lacroix uses film, documentary and photography to explore the conventions of love and the notion of gender. As part of the C&D Residency, she plans to produce an audiovisual device aimed at exploring a form of imagination that would suggest a form of subjectivity through the deployment of mental space like an exterior landscape. The collection of a vast and protean material, made up of montages, interviews, stagings, portraits and drawings accompanied by their audio description, would be exhibited in the form of an immersive installation that would propose to the spectator to cross the device as one would cross the unconscious of an individual.

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