• Matteo Rubbi +

    Visual Artist, Italy

    Matteo Rubbi is a visual artist. He has been an artist-in-residence at Le Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2009); ASU Art Museum, Arizona, US (2012); Montalvo Art Center, California, US (2017). In 2011, he won the 8th Furla Prize, and in 2015 he was selected for the public art program ArtLine in Milan. He has held solo shows in institutions such as Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice; GAMeC, Bergamo; Combine Studios ASU Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. His work has been on view as part of group shows at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Paris; CNAC Le Magasin, Grenoble; PAC, Milan; GAMeC, Bergamo; GAM, Milan.

    Learn more: matteorubbi.com

  • Zeyn Joukhadar +

    Writer, US

    Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster 2020) and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The Map of Salt and Stars was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist. He has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center in California; the Fes Medina Project in Fes, Morocco; Beit al-Atlas in Beirut, Lebanon; and the Arab American National Museum in Michigan.

Zeyn Joukhadar and Matteo Rubbi, "Atlas of Marvels"

The Atlas of Marvels

During their stay at Camargo, Matteo Rubbi and Zeyn Joukhadar conducted research and created a first draft of a visual and narrative star atlas entitled The Atlas of Marvels. The Atlas collects legends and stories about the sky, and is designed to be shared and read aloud while stargazing, if the reader wishes. The work aims to make visible trans-Mediterranean relationships, cultural exchange, and the persistence of history, framing the night sky as a living historical document. The Atlas’s illustrations visualize the 48 constellations of Ptolemy’s Almagest alongside indigenous North African and Arab constellations, and star names, asterisms, and accompanying legends will be given in Arabic, English, Italian, and, if possible, other languages spoken in the Mediterranean region. The title references one of the project’s sources, an anonymous work compiled in Egypt between 1020-1050 AD entitled Kitab Ghara’ib al-Funun wa Mulah al-Uyun, roughly translated to The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes.

Matteo Rubbi and Zeyn Joukhadar were in residence at Camargo in 2020, as part of the Core Program.
They presented their project on March 10, 2020.


Les Carnets de Camargo

To cope with lockdown due to the covid-19 situation in France, we have encouraged our current residents to share their experiences, and so the collaborative project, Les Carnets de Camargo, was born. Visual, written, and spoken testimonies invite us into the residents' lockdown, on the banks of the Mediterranean, hovering between dreams and reality, between illusions and disillusion. As Les Carnets de Camargo also aims at being a bond for our community, through reflection and exchange, these creations will eventually be the testimony of this unprecedented moment.

"When we are isolated from each other, particularly during a traumatic time when so much is beyond our control, the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us are incredibly important. I decided to participate in the Carnets de Camargo project to record my own feelings about what we are going through in the midst of this lockdown, and hopefully, by sharing, to make others feel less alone."(Zeyn Joukhadar)


Zeyn Joukhadar participated in this project by writing a poem entitled "Litany for The Morning After", you can read it here