Artists in residence

Alexandra Pouzet was born in Poitiers in 1975 and grew up in the countryside (north of Vienne, 86), mixing the local dialect with French and rural with urban energies.

She studied modern literature, then worked in radio, talking about ecology and poetry, giving voice to the people of the land. At some point, she took up photography in evening classes at the Beaux-Arts, followed by a tour of France with a polaroid camera and a taste for surrealism (Les veines du temps – 2009-12, with the poet Alain-Pierre Pillet). One series follows another. The question of inhabiting, a body, a house, a floor.

Being inhabited by forces, history and places. She works with people and reflects with them on inhabiting experiences, on the human condition. In 2009, the Frac Poitou-Charentes acquired the whole of Nature humaine, and the B.N.F a folio of her Carte du tendre, which was exhibited in 2017. Her taste for situated gestures, unconventional know-how, raw forms and vernacular ways of doing things has been honed through encounters.

Since 2016, she has been working with anthropologist Bruno Almosnino. With him, she looks at our attachments to objects, the sacred part that binds us to them (Medium – 2018, Presque René Montagne – 2021-23), the end of pastoralism, the reclaiming of the land (Poun naou – 2018-22), what vibrates with spirit in what we usually consider to be inert things (Terrain.s – 2017-21, with Roger Rousseau). They exhibit in art centres and museums, found the Arts Pauvres publishing house, perform and activate images and words in a variety of ways.

For several years now, Alexandra Pouzet has been interested in objects from folk arts and traditions, whose artistic dimension and the images they release or conjure up have led her to work on unconscious rural forms. Her practice is increasingly ‘sculptural’, seeking to express not finite worlds but a continuous present.

Born in 1993, Camille Pradon is a visual artist, she lives and works in Paris and Tunis. 

Her multidisciplinary approach leads her to invest fields of research and experimentation on the very matter of images, their manufacture as well as the frames of their perception. In recent works, the flatness of the image is dissonant, playing on the lure of the place and the reverse or the depth and the surface.

If, as she states, “the image is a matter like any other”, why then not imagine the image as a living, biological matter, capable of an autonomous life and generating its own existence? This leads to ambiguity about the nature of signs, images as well as words or any other constituent data of a formal language.

The artist uses these questions in an elliptical way, working on deconstructing the narrative and putting it into suspense in order to develop tenuous or, on the contrary, vertiginous temporalities. The off-field of Camille Pradon’s images is a matter of sensitive limits.

Her work has been presented at the Ateliers Côteaux (Tunis) in 2018, the Villa Belleville (Paris), the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon – résonance, the Gabes Cinema Fen (Tunisia) and the Festival Traverse vidéo (Toulouse) in 2019. In 2020, La Galerie Les limbes (Saint-Étienne), Finis Terræ – Centre d’art insulaire (Ouessant Island), the El Birou Gallery, the Selma Feriani Gallery and the French Institute of Tunisia will host her works.

She is published as an author and critic by the Magazine du Jeu de Paume (2017), an independent journal of architectural criticism, the magazine Point Contemporain (2019, 2020) and collaborates with Naima Editions (Paris, 2021).

“My residency at the Cité internationale des arts was an intense and unique experience. Thanks to the financial support of the foundation, I was able to serenely develop my projects, to crystallize them, to give shape to new pieces and to devote myself fully to the conception of my next exhibitions.

The exciting encounters with the residents, the team and the partners of the Cité, lead me today to conceive new collaborations, born in the heart of this exceptional living environment and with the complicity of this community of talented and united artists.“