Artists in residence

“Leïla Payet is working on the “fabrication narrative” of the island territory she inhabits. From a research atlas containing reserves of images and data, she composes open-ended and dialogical works. These are partly concerned with what is called “primitive” or “exotic” art and the ways in which they exist on the periphery of globalized thought. Conceived as embryonic productions based on a primary language, her works are elaborated in the following ways like “ritornellas, graphic programs, jets of thought”.

Each corpus, including the central No statues/No statut, thus explores the processes of fabrication of a thought, a discourse or an image, raising sensitive questions about the “processes of creolisation” intimately linked to colonisation and decolonisation.

She thus constructs a global work that moves back and forth, focusing on the permeability of the ideas that circulate within it and the

non-hierarchy of the plastic vocabulary that composes it, between major and minor art, good and bad taste, image artistic, technical, media or vernacular. A work under construction, which questions our “forms of seeing” and carries a struggle for the rehabilitation of histories, languages and territories that are invisible, contorted, dispossessed.”

Leïla Quillacq, text excerpt and interview with the artist, for artists’ papers Reunion Island, 2020.

Romario Paz Gómez (1995. Cali, Colombia) is an Afro-caleño artist who listens to traditional Pacific music, trap and salsa choke. Master in Plastic Arts in Cali (2024) and Master in Research in Arts and Creation in Madrid (2026), his artistic and research practice are cemented in the concepts of home, family traditions and ways of inhabiting the “places of the empty”, understood as spaces from their black and neighborhood identity. His work has been exhibited in international venues such as Essex Art Center Massachusetts, Rocca Paolina Perugia, Goethe-Institute Paris, as well as in various venues in Colombia such as the Banco de la República, Museo Afro de Colombia, Museo La Tertulia, MAMU, among others. He is co-founder of the SLICA (Spain) and La Guayunga (Colombia) collectives.

Alice Peach (1996) is an Anglo-Italian artist based in Milan. Her multidisciplinary practice moves across painting, sculpture and printmaking, in a process that uses mostly modular elements, textile patterns, and scale-modelling materials.

After earning a BA in Fine Art and Textiles from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2020, she continued developing her practice in Berlin between 2020 and 2022, before returning to Italy in 2023.

Her work has been presented in multiple galleries and independent spaces across Europe, including Clima Gallery (Milan), Vin Vin (Vienna), Studio Hanniball (Berlin), Magma Maria (Offenbach am Main), La Placette (Lausanne), Sentiment Zh (Paris), Heerz Tooya (Vishovgrad), Castiglioni Gallery (Milan), and Associazione Barriera (Turin).