Artists in residence

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi is a curatorial duo founded in Paris in 2008. Since 2018 they have been the director of the Chiara Fumai Archive.

In 2015 they founded The Internet Saga, an itinerant project that moves between institutional spaces of art and places of reality.

Recent exhibitions include Kenneth Goldsmith, Hillary: The Hillary Clinton Emails, in conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2019 and Jonas Mekas, It All Came Back to Me in Brief Glimpses at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul 2018.

Hamid Rahiche is an Algerian photographer who has been working for several years on urban issues and social changes around the city of Algiers and more broadly around the Mediterranean territory.

The artist testifies to the place of men in their daily lives and living spaces. Through his works, he seeks to understand to what extent places make men what they are by questioning the individuality in the mass. Hamid Rahiche is a photographer of the human being, nourished by his own history and culture, which he uses as a backdrop. He develops a singular style in an intimate and sensitive photographic style. The striking photographs in his series Algiers, Climat de France were taken over several years in the heart of the Climat de France architectural complex in Algiers, where the photographer grew up.

Built between 1955 and 1957 on the heights of Bab el Oued, facing the sea, Climat de France was above all the grandiose and humanistic vision of the French architect Fernand Pouillon. He started this project of a monumental and utopian city in the middle of the Algerian war in order to relieve the slums and thus alleviate a serious housing crisis, counting on this atypical and spectacular construction to welcome and pacify the Algerian people. This city, an atypical example of architecture, built around a large square called “the two hundred columns” was supposed to accommodate 30,000 people. It currently accommodates more than 50,000 inhabitants. The urban utopia has become an overcrowded ghetto and the scene of a real social malaise.

Hamid Rahiche knows the violence, the codes, the rights and rules of this city. But he also knows all the possibilities of this place, of the optimism that is not spoken of. From this closed and opaque place, the artist, by dint of respect and patience, has succeeded in extracting luminous shots of truth and authenticity. His photographs tell us about playful kids, loving mothers, young people who dream of a better future. Hamid Rahiche depicts through his works a completely different reality. He breathes an identity of his own, a voice to the most marginalized. Hamid Rahiche’s images speak to us of sensitivity and hope in the heart of a concrete prison.

– Béranger Chamboisier