Season 4 in Paris - Trembling with the Earth
Our residency program this year is titled Tremors of the Earth. It is not about studying earthquakes or seismic movements but rather about exploring the field of investigation revealed by the Gaia hypothesis proposed by chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis: the Earth is a sensitive superorganism that responds to human activity. We bear a moral and fundamental responsibility toward the Earth, which sustains and nourishes us. We interact with it as we do with the Other, trembling in its presence as it reacts to our actions.
Making objects from a material such as clay - ancestral, moldable, raw, fired or transformed into a refractory material - gives us the opportunity to reflect on the contemporary, sometimes ambivalent, relationship that humans have with their environment, the mistakes we've made and the repairs we can make.
Ninon Hivert
6 November - 11 December 2024
Ninon Hivert, the third artist in residence, has built up a photographic archive of ordinary, everyday objects, clothes and accessories, which she revisits from memory, giving them a soul beyond their use. These are not replicas, but archaeological relics of our time, which summon up the beings who wore them, imprints of insignificant humans grappling with their environment, sartorial exuvia, like the Lambda project, not unlike classical studies of shadows and folds in drapery. By sculpting in clay the traces of our movements, Ninon Hivert transfers to them a sensitivity and fragility that sends us back to our origins, but also to our own finitude.
Joke Raes
10 June - 14 July / 1 - 25 octobre 2024
The energetic delicacy of Joke Raes' works reflects the emergence of a new relationship with the world and with oneself, closer to Bruno Latour's notion of the “ravaudeur”, the person who repairs, rather than that of the “extractor”. The extraordinarily fine, masterfully crafted porcelain sculptures in the Masks series are striking in their apparent organic explosion, as if the material had escaped its creator and entered into a genuine dialogue with her, on equal terms. A language is invented, unconscious and emotional, questioning the fragile balance of our inner life as it confronts the beings around us, our bonds of kinship, friendship and social ties.
Ry Rocklen
9 - 26 septembre 2024
Ry Rocklen, the season's second artist, creates ceramic sculptures from everyday objects he recovers from flea markets, modifying and assembling them in incongruous ways. His sculptures are often hybrid, fragmented, with a shelf running through them, or double-sided, revealing the hidden side in total contradiction to appearances. His work, confronted with the banal and insignificant, is not devoid of humor and tenderness. He questions our relationship with cultural injunctions and consumerism, using the object as a mirror of ourselves.