Artists in residence

Camilo Méndez is a composer of acoustic concert music. He conceives his works as compositional cycles; series of pieces orbiting around the same musical ideas but written for different instrumental combinations. He completed a Doctorate and a Master’s in advanced composition at the Royal College of Music in London. He has also studied with Rebecca Saunders and Pierluigi Billone. In 2017, Méndez was appointed as the Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Academy of Music at HKBU.

His music has been performed by ensembles and soloists who specialize in contemporary concert music and has been featured in such international festivals as Festival Internacional Cervantino, the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, June in Buffalo, Klasik Keyifler, the Mallorca Saxophone Festival, and Next Generation Donaueschingen. Méndez has been awarded the Colombian National Prize in Composition, Colombia’s highest honor for music composition on two occasions, in 2023 and 2009. In 2021, his work Disappeared Quipu[s] received the first prize in the UiTM String Quartet International Composition Competition. He has held residencies and fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Willapa Bay AiR, the Bogliasco Foundation, Ensemble Recherche and the Goethe-Institut, the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts, MacDowell Foundation, and Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Mengzhi Zheng – French, Chinese born – is a visual artist living in Lyon. Space is at the heart of its concerns. This translates into “flat” works (drawings, engravings, photographs) and works in volume that he declines at different scales and that he presents and installs both inside and outside.

He was noticed for his series of “Abandoned mock-ups”, which he has been developing since 2014. They are small sculptures made of cardboard, paper and small woods assembled and glued. Fragile but stable, they are mounted in Mikado.

Whenever possible, he also creates large installation sculptures that interact with the exhibition space. These installations, the visitor is invited to cross them physically and mentally, and thus to “inhabit” them in a transitional and poetic way. His drawings and paintings in space take the form of “non-functional architextures”.

He has exhibited abroad in Frankfurt, Leipzig, Amsterdam, Casablanca, Shanghai, etc. In France he participated in the Hors-les-Murs du Palais de Tokyo in resonance at the Lyon Biennale in 2015, the Hortillonnages in Amiens in 2017, the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans in Frac Centre in 2017-2018 where he was also resident for this occasion. He is currently working on the installation of a monumental and permanent work in the public space as part of the renovation of the LPA Les Halles car park in the centre of Lyon.