ARCHIPEL RESIDENCY
The Archipel residency, under the aegis of the Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France, takes place in a little-known ecosystem: art schools for amateurs and arts schools preparing students for artistic educations. The encounters between young artists and the publics of these schools encourage the emergence of temporary communities and leave lasting marks on regional art.
For three months, teams of professionals accompany the artists who receive a housing grant and a production grant, an essay on their work is commissioned from and art critic, and exhibitions are organised in the region. Through this residency, the Frac helps forge links between various partners (museums, schools, fab labs and so on) to reach out to inhabitants, look at the works together and share their interpretations.
Initiated by the Drac des Hauts-de-France and the Frac Grand Large, Archipel receives support from the Département du Pas-de-Calais through the aid given to PÔLE LITTORAL: the École Municipale d’Arts de Boulogne-sur-Mer and the École d’Art du Calaisis Le Concept. The partner schools of PÔLE INTÉRIEUR are the École d’Arts Plastiques Espace Villar(t)s de Denain and the Centre des Arts Plastiques et Visuels de la Ville de Lille.
THE RESIDENCY
SUPPORTING CREATIVITY
Intended to accompany the work of beginner artists, this residency makes available workshops from schools focussing on various practices, including sculpture, printmaking and photography. Welcomed by a territorial hub constituted of two art schools and a network of cultural actors, the artists benefit from a collection of resources, capable of making their experimentation productive. The residency thus enables encounters, the sharing of knowhow and the discovery of a region, and offers the opportunity to exchange with an art critic during exhibitions and conversations.
PROMOTING ENCOUNTERS WITH THE PUBLIC
Installed in visual art schools, the daily presence of the artists provides the opportunity to forge links with the publics of the schools, which are committed to the discover and amateur practice of the visual arts. Contemporary art in all its diversity and the work of research, experimentation and production are comprehended in a concrete manner in a relationship of proximity and sharing.
A DYNAMIC ON THE SCALE OF THE HAUTS-DE-FRANCE
Conceived on the scale of the Hauts-de-France region, this programme of research and artistic residencies benefits from the networking of an ensemble of singular structures and territories. Like an archipelago, these structures disseminated over a discontinuous geographical area are characterised by the cohesion and the links they maintain and the shared ambition to support creativity and share experiences.
The residency takes place from September to January and is followed by the exhibition season between February and June.
RÉSIDENCE ARCHIPEL 2022:
Apolline Ducrocq and Céleste Rogosin
APOLLINE DUCROCQ / PÔLE INÉRIEUR
Graduate of the ÉSÄ Dunkerque-Tourcoing, Apolline Ducrocq is a “DIY artist, researcher and collector. My work revolves around sculpture, assemblage, photography and installation, and I question the urban and architectural space in constant mutation through the image of the construction site, an environment in which I have wandered since my childhood. My practice tends to think of creation as a construction, as a way to trigger experiences. Making narratives about and with the world, in an active relationship with stories from a site, a terrain.”
CÉLESTE ROGOSIN / PÔLE LITTORAL
Initially trained in dance, theater and cinema, Céleste Rogosin graduated from Le Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporains in 2021. She develops a transdisciplinary and performative writing where myths, bodies and landscapes dialogue. Through films and installations, she uses fiction to reveal the political stakes of the relationship between bodies and space. The notions of utopias – or at least their research and multiple attempts at affirmation – are in permanent redefinition in her projects. Through the quest for another becoming of the body, be it archaic, animal or technological, she seeks to bring into existence alternative liberatory spaces, both physical and mental.
RÉSIDENCE ARCHIPEL 2021:
Marina Vandra and Guilhem Roubichou
MARINA VANDRA / PÔLE LITTORAL
Trained in engraving and scenography, Marina Vandra practised printmaking for quite some time before launching into large-format acrylic paintings on paper. The stylised compositions created during her residency tweaked the aesthetics of tapestry by bringing into play the architecture and history of buildings. In Boulogne-sur-Mer, inspiration from the old library found her cutting up her drawings as well as resorting to marbled motifs – the kind found in old books – and an orange-toned palette. In Calais, her exhibition used the azure tints of the coastline with shapes suggestive of both the lightness of clouds and military camouflage.
GUILHEM ROUBICHOU / PÔLE INTÉRIEUR
After studying at art school and then founding an artists’ collective in Brussels, Guilhem Roubichou decided on a return to the rural context of his native Ariège region in south-western France. His studio serves as a storehouse for raw materials gleaned from the surrounding area. Remnants of steel, tyres and plastic bear witness to urban de-industrialisation and the transformation of agricultural landscapes. Transferred into the gallery, the privacy screens intended as protection from prying eyes, highlight their wear and tear. Scrap metal and corrosion rub shoulders with living forms. During his residency in the mining region, the artist focused on the way monumental engravings combine the abrupt gesture of projecting acid with the fine honing of the figures.
RÉSIDENCE ARCHIPEL 2020:
Adrien Degioanni and Marc-Antoine Garnier
ADRIEN DEGIOANNI / PÔLE INTÉRIEUR
It is in working with the fragile nature of the noises that we call “silences” and the artificial sounds that have no equivalent in nature that Adrien Degioanni elaborations broadcasting systems from which emerge sonic environments and sculptures. Sound – a physical and invisible element – consciously and unconsciously fashions our perception of the world. His research and the material correlations between sound, [exhibition] spaces and our ambling bodies, call into question the transitory and audible states that become strained between presence and absence, concrete and abstract. Degioanni, who was born in Toulouse, is a graduate of the ESAPB (Biarritz, 2014) and the ISDAT (Toulouse, 2016). In 2018 he cofounded the exhibitions collective Grande Surface in Brussels. He lives and works between France and Belgium.
MARC-ANTOINE GARNIER / PÔLE LITTORAL
A graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen, Marc-Antoine Garnier has attempted over numerous years to call photography into question through its spatialisation, its relationship to the support and through its sculptural power. This desire to become free from the classic use of the photographic medium has led to new relationships between the image and the viewer, and is now closely linked to nature. Beyond the image; it is its materiality that leads us to question our relationship to time and to our own existence and commits us to think about nature and the human condition.
RÉSIDENCE ARCHIPEL 2019:
Nefeli Papadimouli and Maxime Testu
NEFELI PAPADIMOULI / PÔLE LITTORAL
Born in 1988, she lives and works between Athens and Paris.
A graduate of the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens and of the ENSBA Paris, her installations highlight the importance of the human body – “the first place in which we exist” – by often calling for a direction implication of the viewer with the piece of art (the state of the work as a manner of acting). She experiments and opposes concepts that inhabit society – such as difference and resemblance, union and opposition – as so many poetic exercises enabling the redefinition of the cultural construction built by our perceptions and values.
MAXIME TESTU / PÔLE INTÉRIEUR
Born in 1990, he lives and works in Paris.
Having trained at the ENSBA de Lyon and at the HEAD in Genève, Maxime Testu works in paratext. He expresses himself as the collector and, in a certain sense, the curator of iconographical material whose organisation replaces argued discourse. References to the American artist Paul Thek (United States, 1933–1988) may be found in his work, particularly in the encounter of the artistic and machine forms as well as in the biomorphic perspective of the tool, envisaged as a sensitive, cognitive and aesthetic experiment.
RÉSIDENCE ARCHIPEL 2018:
Jean-Julien Ney and Emmanuel Simon
JEAN-JULIEN NEY / PÔLE LITTORAL
Jean-Julien Ney’s work is the result of a quest for analogies between volume and image. Taking the form of installations combining sculpture and photography, this experimentation produces autonomous systems conveying their own codes and logic. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Jean-Julien Ney has exhibited at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac (Pantin) as part of Jeune Création 67e, at the Frac-Artothèque Limousin (Limoges), at ZOO Galerie (Nantes) and at the Galerie Hors Les Murs (Marseille).
EMMANUEL SIMON / PÔLE INTÉRIEUR
During his residencies and exhibitions, Emmanuel Simon asks other artists to work with him, giving them carte blanche to intervene on one of his canvases or take part in the creation of a collective, ephemeral or not. During these shared moments, the rules and protocols of the work, the name of the piece and the exhibition conditions are devised, and the participants become co-artists. Simon likes to dilute himself in these collectives. A graduate of the Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse, Simon has exhibited his work at the Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille), the Galerie Jeune Création (Paris) and the Frac Occitanie Montpellier.
RÉSIDENCE ARCHIPEL 2017:
Sacha Golemanas and Ève Chabanon
SACHA GOLEMANAS / PÔLE LITTORAL
Sacha Golemanas’s sculptures and installations are the fruit of visual and conceptual analogies at the crossroads of various poetic worlds. The nature and history of her observation and appropriation are at the heart of her work. She calls into question our relationship to the animal; how it exists through us, our cultures and our iconographies. In her current work, the aquatic element and its visual potential predominate.
ÈVE CHABANON / PÔLE INTERIEUR
Ève Chabanon is a French artist based in London. Through performance, writing and the design of pretext objects, she builds physical and conceptual spaces that provoke the involvement of marginalised groups or individuals. She thus draws on the mythologies of the private and borrows her tools from activism and various alternative educational systems for her take on everyday objects.
