Student Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty, Dove Allouche, Hicham Berrada and Mimosa Echard, artist-professors at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, are among the winning residents of the first edition of the Villa Albertine.
After Villa Medici, Casa Velasquez and Villa Kujoyama, France is getting a new networked cultural institution that renews the concept of residency. Located in 10 major U.S. cities (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington DC), the Villa will host 60 exploratory residencies per year throughout the United States. These tailor-made residencies, lasting from one to three months, are intended for creators of all disciplines, researchers but also professionals from the cultural world.
To embrace the vastness and variety of the American territory, but also to respond in an individualized way to the expectations of the residents, the Villa Albertine breaks with the historical model of Villas (a single building in a single city). Accompanied by a team of 80 people, the Villa Albertine residencies are intended to multiply exchanges with American society and the creative ecosystem, and thus to nourish an artistic and intellectual research project, and create a community at the service of the arts and ideas.
Dove Allouche, in residence in Houston and Marfa
For several years, Dove Allouche has undertaken a body of work that often originates from his many collaborations with scientists. During his residency, he will focus on the first prebiotic molecules, of cosmic origin. They constitute one of the preferred hypotheses to explain the appearance of life on our planet. By what creative process was life born from inert matter? And how, from this same matter, can we produce works that embody nothing other than their mere appearance? In Marfa, an ideal location for celestial observation, Dove Allouche plans to initiate new research in astrobiology to produce laboratory images directly from organic samples.
Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty, in residence in Chicago
In partnership with the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty is a French-Malagasy artist who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Montpellier and is currently a student at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Winner of the first edition of the Sarr 2021 Prize, which associates the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Sarr collection, he is invited for a residency in Chicago. His project focuses on the aquatic environments of large lakes and includes social and environmental issues. Pierre-Alexandre works on the alteration of matter by time and climate change, disappearance, the memory of places, petrification, as well as on the capacity of water to reveal, resurrect or destroy. He wishes to extend this work to Chicago and propose a history of the great lakes that is at once social, spiritual, and geological; another reading without hierarchy between species and living organisms as well as between individual and collective memories.
Hicham Berrada, in residence in Miami
French-Moroccan artist Hicham Berrada's installations subtly blend art and science, modifying the physical parameters of an environment(water pH, temperature, luminosity, air pressure), to create the conditions necessary for the emergence of the expected plastic result. In Miami, the artist will continue his research on morphogenesis, defined as the study of the laws that determine forms in nature. Hicham Berrada will observe corals, whose forms blur the boundaries between animal, mineral and plant genres. In particular, he will look at a new species of pollution-resistant coral, resulting from the hybridization of two endangered species, and meet with researchers who are trying to adapt corals to an environment that human action has modified.
Mimosa Echard, in residence in Miami
Mimosa Echard is interested in creating hybrid ecosystems where the living and the non-living, the human and the non-human cohabit. Her works explore areas of contact and contamination between organic and consumer objects, elements that our cultural conventions may perceive as ambivalent, even contradictory. In Miami, a city frantically building on the water, Mimosa Echard intends to explore the cultural, social and political overlays that constitute this contrasting urban space: protected and annihilated natural spaces, brand new buildings and shopping malls, labyrinthine residential neighborhoods and ultra-secure luxury villas.
