Artists in residence

Makenzy Orcel was born in 1983 in Port-au-Prince. After studying linguistics, he left the university to devote himself to literature. He published two collections of poems, La Douleur de l’étreinte in 2007 and Sans Ailleurs in 2009. A collection crossed by the themes of night, confinement, and elsewhere.

In the aftermath of the earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince with the same destructive force as the Hiroshima bomb, Makenzy Orcel wrote Les Immortelles to tell of the madness of living in spite of the horror as much as to deliver the most insolent testimony in the face of the apocalypse. It is to the prostitutes of Port-au-Prince, to these “immortals” that he wanted to pay homage, those whose voices were not heard at the time of the media coverage of the disaster.

I don’t want to write about what everyone sees, and what everyone likes, I’m not interested. I want to be in the underbelly of things. Of letters, of society of everything. Haiti is a country of shadows, and I draw from the shadows.

— Makenzy Orcel

Les Immortelles, with which he has won the SGDL’s Thyde Monnier Prize, is his first novel, embroidered like a collection of prose. The sparse paragraphs that cut across the white page conceal all the intensity and violence of pain.

With Les Latrines, published in 2011 by Mémoires d’encrier, Mackenzy Orcel continues his exploration of the underworld, offering the mesmerized reader a veritable feast of language in the maze of the slums of Port-au-Prince.

La Nuit des terrasses, a collection of poems, is a dive into bar life, brimming with disparate memories… A true celebration of the moment, of the meeting of bodies and friendship.

He has published L’Ombre animale in 2016, a novel that won —among others— the Prix Littérature-Monde and the Prix Louis Guilloux. The title perfectly captures the spirit of a chiaroscuro novel where the body is exposed, decomposed and renewed. Makenzy Orcel is an archaeologist of meaning, a sensory writer who draws from marginality a rare power of evocation. An ambitious and demanding novel, L’Ombre animale has not finished fascinating us.

Caverne, published in 2017 by La Contre Allée, is a collection of introspective poems that explore the interior, the intimate and go back to childhood. It is an opportunity to visit the dead —relatives, friends or strangers— and to give them life in order to heal his own wounds.

In 2018, he signed Maître-Minuit, a novel in which he revisits a legendary Haitian myth through the intermediary of Poto, a cartoonist in the 1950s, who crosses the history of his country. The writer skillfully plays on the contrasts and musicality of the language to paint a portrait of Haiti at a troubled period when madness seems to be taking over the island.

Jera ak Jèta, his first play, directed by Pascale Julio, has been performed several times in Haiti, notably at the Quatre Chemins festival, and as part of the “Livres en Folie” event.

— Text from Étonnants Voyageurs

Magdalena Orellana is an Argentinian filmmaker, artist, and designer based in Madrid. Her work intersects fiction and non-fiction across film, sound, photography, and design. She focuses on the everyday and the ordinary, exploring how these elements shape our experience of public spaces. Interested in the interplay between collective and individual experiences, she often experiments with language, diverse formats, and genres. She has also been an artist-in-residence at La Casa Encendida (2019), CA2M (2019), Matadero Madrid (2020), and V2_ Lab for The Unstable Media (2019). She was a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow, a 2021 Ikusmira Berriak Fellow, and a 2024-2025 In Situ Programme Laureate at the Cité internationale des arts, in partnership with the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso. Currently, she is developing her first feature film, Until the Place Becomes Improbable.

Zolbootuguldur Orgil born in 1987, is in illustrator and painter in the middle career artist who graduated from Institute of Fine Arts of the Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture in 2010 with degree in “Mongolian Traditional painting”.

She also studied (2010-2012) at the School of Fine Arts and Renovation at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Thorun. She is currently living and working Ulaanbaatar, with family and she is mother of two.She is well-known artist in the field of visual arts in the country,having staged six times solo exhibition in Mongolia. Last exhibition staged in Mongolia at 5-14 in April, 2024. She also participated in more than twenty jointed international exhibitions in Malaysia, Japan, Thailand, Korea, Russia, China, USA, Poland and illustrated over twenty children’s books.

Now she is also working on children’s book Dream crafter that her own author book. That book is contracted Enchanted Lion publishing at New York City in USA. She has been working on subconscious, unconscious and trauma for 5 years. Now working on traumatic children’s who live in countryside nomadic lifestyle. And trying to compare with metropolitan city’s children psychology problems.

Ela Orleans, a composer, video artist, performer, and academic, fuses composition, video art, performance, and academia into a mesmerizing tapestry. Her sample-driven melodies evoke the nostalgic echoes of ’50s and ’60s pop, weaving elegant harmonies and atmospheric narratives that pay homage to influences ranging from BBC Radiophonic Workshop to the Éthiopiques saga and to Bernard Herrmann’s cinematic scores.

Since her debut Low Sun/High Moon in 2008, Orleans has garnered international acclaim, gracing esteemed venues including MoMA PS1, MoCA, The Venice Biennale, and TATE Britain, she also toured across the UK, Europe, the USA, and Canada. A polymath, Orleans weaves her artistry across albums, film soundtracks, theatre, and opera. Her 2023 PhD from the University of Glasgow cements her journey’s intellectual resonance.

The project she is going to work on during her residency at the Cité internationale des arts – La Nuit Dorée, is an audio-visual composition sculpted from the patterns of iconic French songs of the ’60s and ’70s. Orleans envisions a symphony of opulent pop, interwoven with archival collages, vividly resurrecting Paris of yore. “Musically, I aim to craft upbeat pop, using proven recipes. Visually, archival collages will adorn my melodies, bringing the era to life,” says Orleans. The project is an invitation to partake in a timeless symphony, an ode to the past that resonates in the present.