The Enlightenment before the Enlightenment: Native Peoples, the Jesuit Relations, and the Indigenization of European Society

Anderson’s research project argues that the philosophy and epistemology of Native peoples in the early seventeenth century North America presaged the future direction of European thought: representing something of an “Enlightenment before the Enlightenment.”  In contrast to the authoritarianism and exclusivism of early modern Europeans (both Catholic and Protestant), Indigenous peoples were cultural relativists who favored religious toleration and utilized rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism in weighing religious claims.  In contrast to Christianity’s crisp dualisms, Indigenous spirituality tended towards the monistic and holistic: experiencing as a seamless whole what European Christians differentiated as “body” and “soul,” and eschewing the extreme characterizations of “good” and “evil” for situational ethics.  Early modern indigenous societies were proto-democratic, presenting a sharp contrast with the absolute monarchies of Europe and with papal supremacy.  Indigenous unfamiliarity with Christian assumptions rendered them formidable critics of its central theological tenants.  They posed questions that were literally unimaginable for Europeans steeped in the creed.  The project suggests, then, that seventeenth-century indigenous-European encounter in colonial North America was actually even more transformative intellectually, theologically, and culturally for Europeans than it was for Native societies. 
The eight-week Camargo Core Program Residency was pivotal to Anderson’s progress through the early stages of her new research project.  It provided her ample time to read and reflect upon the seventy-three volumes of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, as well as other key primary materials by seventeenth-century century authors, including explorers Samuel de Champlain and Jacques Marquette, Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnation, Récollets Chretien Le Clerq and Gabriel Sagard, Protestant Marc Lescarbot, and the scathingly anticlerical Baron de Lahontan.  The Camargo Foundation’s location in Cassis, within an easy forty-five minute drive of the Archives Nationales d’Outremer in Aix-en-Provence also permitted the exploitation of documents that offered intriguing new perspectives on religious colonialism in early modern Canada.  More intangibly, the generous time and space for reflection and discussion at Camargo enabled the comprehensive conceptualization of the project and the production of detailed chapter-by-chapter outlines of the entire book.
Anderson’s time at Camargo also provided ample opportunities for her ancillary research on several fascinating aspects of local religious culture, from the fabrication of tiny Christmas crèche figures, les santons, to the cult of Provençal saints, which represents an intriguing case study of Gallic indigenization of Roman Catholicism.  Provence abounds in legends of saints (be they biblical figures such as Mary Magdalene, Martha and Lazarus or extra-canonical characters such as Maximin, Sidoine, and Sarah) being condemned to sail-less, anchor-less, and oar-less boats in the Holy Land.  The deviously elaborate death sentence of their Roman persecutors, however, backfires spectacularly when these saints triumphantly land on French shores to propagate the Catholic faith by slaying troublesome regional monsters (Ste. Marthe’s victory over la tarasque in Tarascon) or by living formidably ascetic lives in local caves (Ste. Marie Madeleine at La Sainte Baume).  
Anderson also made strides in another research project that addresses the conundrum of another contemporary Provencal religious phenomenon, les Pénitents Blancs.  These modern-day representatives of a penitential, humanitarian Catholic fraternity founded in the twelfth century today often face misidentification and condemnation as members of the Ku Klux Klan, because of their traditional white gowns and full-face hoods.
Finally, the tragic fire at Notre-Dame-de-Paris during the final week of her residency prompted Anderson to write the following piece on the famous cathedral’s history and significance:
ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/anderson-rage-rejection-and-reverence-the-passion-of-notre-dame

Shadowbox

While in residence at the Camargo Foundation, Arthur worked on a third collection of poems that are varied in theme, some of them introspective, and others more explicitly outward-looking. Many of the poems are direct addresses to an unidentified person. Though Arthur works mainly in free verse, his poems’ meaning is significantly influenced by the repetition and organization of sound. Many of his poems contain rhyme and sustained runs of iambic or anapestic accentual-syllabic verse, yet Arthur often establishes metrical expectations only for the sake of breaking them, aspiring to write poems that are rhythmically well-constructed, down to the level of the syllable, but also indivisible in their parts, so that the reader cannot easily separate the poem into discrete metrical feet or metrical phrases. Though Arthur characterizes his reasons for writing in this way as being intuitive and aesthetic, not theoretical, Arthur has said that he would like to create poems that have the aural richness and expressive range of metered verse without the symmetries and parallel structures that are characteristic of much formal poetry, and which are particularly associated with received forms such as sonnets, villanelles, and ballads. To the extent that such symmetries present themselves immediately as signatures of order, and therefore as evidence of the poet’s own shaping intelligence, Arthur prefers that in his own poetry they be concealed, so that the sense of order emerges only gradually, as the reader encounters the poem line by line. During the final week of his residency, Arthur gave a presentation at the Centre International de Poésie Marseille, providing a brief overview of the metrical tradition in English-language prosody and situating his own poetry within that context. Arthur read a short selection of his poems in English, accompanied by Michaël Batalla, who read French translations provided by Martin Richet.

The Heroine’s Journey Beyond Winds

Worked on the first drafts of the scripts of two thematic sequels to the film series with the umbrella title “The Heroine’s Journey Beyond Winds”, which started with her debut short Boreas (2006) and first feature-length film Zephyr (2010). The works-in-progress expand more on the themes of the two previous works; loss, death, fear of abandonment, parent-and-child relationship, and humankind's place in nature, in the frame of a coming-of-age story that follows the characters’ passing through the threshold of different phases of growing up/old.
Took inspirational notes for the possible mise-en-scènes, drawing upon the sights and sounds; visions, dreams and daydreams, and interactions with other people during her residency at Camargo.
Also took lots of pictures of darkish seascapes that were planned to be used for the ‘photo-storyboards’ to help to figure out the visual tone, and recorded some ambient sounds (winds, particularly) which can contribute to the soundscapes of the projects.

Simple as ABC #3: The Wild Hunt

The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that hunting humans was an art. It was to be practised against others who were destined by nature to be governed. To what extent has his text influenced thinking and justified violence over the centuries? And what are its implications 2,400 years later? How clear-cut or reversible are the categories of 'the hunters', 'the onlookers' and 'the hunted'? Mixing object theatre and sound installation, Simple as ABC #3: The Wild Hunt will try to piece together a many-voiced portrait of today’s humanhunt. 
The Wild Hunt is the third instalment of Thomas Bellinck’s growing series that examines the Western migration machine. It follows a theatrical essay about cutting-edge detection technology (Man vs. Machine) and a documentary musical about the digitalization of migration management (Keep Calm and Validate).

Lamento di...

Fabrizio Cassol is currently working on his new project Lamento di... Inspired by Monteverid's Madrigals, Cassol is working with gypsy multi-instrumentalist and singer Tcha Limberger to bring back to life some stories from the time of the Romani genocide.

Lonely Planet

During his residency, Matthew Chamberlain worked on a piano solo commissioned by Fondation Royaumont for Claudia Chan. Titled Lonely Planet, the piece explores a radical asymmetry between its material resources: while it is texturally confined to chordal homophony, its harmonies are rigorously diverse, drawn stochastically from a massive database of all physically playable chords on the piano. In light of this asymmetry, the piece enacts a process central to all of our lives: in ignorance, it searches for somewhere to make a home.

Lustralis (for string quartet)

Lustralis is grounded on the inner sensitivity of variant sounds; a sphere to inhabit. Pursuit in similarities, advance in contrastes, search for the whole. Implode to fuse, then explode – modulations and colours; path into natural varnishing. Purification?

Sebastiano Blu

During her residency, Pauline Curnier Jardin continued to write her first feature film, Sebastiano Blu, a fiction inspired by a certain masculinity and formidable anti-religious traditions that one encounters in the Mediterranean. A beautiful young man’s insatiable need for attention and obsessive thoughts and fears about women, lead him down a tormented and fatal path. Giogetto is handsome. He is the DJ. He still lives with his parents in his childhood bedroom and smells of soap, the smell of his loving mother. His powerful father is master of ceremony of the biggest party of the year, dedicated to San Sebastiano, patron saint of the village. Giorgetto’s earliest memories: as a crying baby, offered by his father to the Saint, and overhearing his mother and his aunt whispering: "poor Giorgetto, he may be sterile…"

O Kim?

Recently there has emerged a peculiar tendency to name his works with the Turkish demonstrative ‘O’ which in English roughly corresponds to ‘that’ or ‘this’. Cengiz Eren already had a number of pieces in his catalogue that contain this somewhat mystical word in combination with another short word (O yer, ODA, O kişi). O Kim? is another one of these works that bring about this obsession. In this upcoming work, Cengiz set up an abstract narrative that conveys a single entity struggling to come into being; a sound identity attempting to garner adequate justification to exist.

I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t | Translating Sonia Sanchez’s dramatic works

Completion of a translation project, first translation into French of a selection of plays by American playwright and poet Sonia Sanchez. Seven plays in total, short and long, written between 1968 and 2009, and part of a collection entitled I’m Black When I’m Singing I’m Blue When I Ain’t. Sonia Sanchez’s work is multifaceted, with an untiring creative and political commitment. Her voice is a compelling one, and quite challenging for a translator. The idea is to recreate the poetics of these plays in French: to find their voices, their rhythms, to seize the “gesture” of their language. Much time has been spent editing, rewriting, mouthing and polishing up the texts of those seven plays. To give ear, to lend voice. The collection is to be published late 2019 by L’Arche Editeur. In addition to that initial project I brought with me another on-going translation, which I was delighted to resume in Camargo: it is a novel by Australian writer Gail Jones, who was here as a fellow in 2005, and who did, at the time, encourage me to apply for a Camargo fellowship! When I first arrived at Camargo, I have felt compelled to return to that novel, Sixty Lights: it seemed just perfect and obvious to do so, in the beautiful light of Cassis, and considering the fact that all those years ago, Gail Jones has been staying here before this same sea, in this same light, writing an extraordinary novel that I later translated: Sorry. My translation of her equally marvelous novel, Sixty Lights, started 15 years ago, will be published late 2019 or early 2020 by Le Nouvel Attila.

Invisible

At Camargo, Nicolas Floc’h further developped his ongoing research and started new projects as well. He  pursued his photographic work on artificial reefs and natural habitats within the Mediterranean ecosystem. Moreover he continued the work he started at the marine laboratory of Wimereux on the color of water and bioluminescence. Among the new projects, he undertook research about submarine geomorphology and its impact on the environment.

Amkoullel: The Childhood of a Fulani Boy, a translation of Amkoullel, l’enfant peul, volume I of the Memoirs of Amadou Hampâté Bâ (Actes Sud, 1991, 1992, 2012; Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire, 1991)

During her eleven-week Camargo Residency, Jeanne Garane was able to complete a first draft of the entire translation of Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel, The Fula Boy, volume I of Bâ’s memoirs (Arles, Actes sud, 2012). The work is composed of nine chapters, including a foreword by the ethnographer and friend of A.H. Bâ, Théodore Monod. In particular, at Camargo, Jeanne worked on the translation of chapters six through nine, and have now begun the detailed work of revising, correcting, and polishing the draft. She will also soon begin writing a scholarly introduction to the work. This will be about twenty-five manuscript pages in length.
Some of the content and ideas for this introduction were generated as part of Garane presentation to the other Camargo Fellows during her residency. These include having located a collection of photographs in the public domain that depict people and places included in Amkoullel and that date from 1906, and that could possibly be included in the translated volume, and the realization that A.H. Bâ is the only major writer of his generation (the so-called “first generation” of post-colonial  “Francophone” writers) to have had so few of his works translated. She has also reflected further on A.H. Bâ’s formal writing style and how to render that in English. Indeed, Jeanne has chosen to retain the somewhat formal language register Bâ uses in narration and dialogue. However, in places where Bâ relates dialogue spoken in known as “le français des tirailleurs” locally known as “foforifon napsa” (a kind of lingua franca mixing French and West African languages developed by the French military and indigenous infantrymen during the French colonial period), she used both word-for-word translation and the implantation of certain recognizable French words in the translated text. Given that Bâ includes a number of footnotes, she used these to explain, as Bâ does, certain cultural practices.
In total, Jeanne translated about 350 pages, which equals about half of the entire manuscript draft of about 700 pages. With this preliminary work completed, she will now seek additional grants to help support the publication of this lengthy but important work.

Boundaries

The Calanques National Park contains several boundaries. It encompasses frictions between entities that have to coexist: the nature and the city, but also between its very users (such as hikers, inhabitants, and scientists). Franck Gérard wandered through the Park to observe the landscape. He then log his observations in a residency diary. The project will therefore represent an investigation, a reflection on our connections with nature—and especially with the idyllic environment of the Calanques National Park.

Inside Guillaume

During the residency, Gruber has developped his new film project Inside Guillaume. The film is the third episode of the film series The Conspicuous Parts that enact a fluctuating focus on crucial choices made by individuals in cultural contexts and how they are being affected by global politics. The plot of the film revolves around a collaborative artwork of two Cypriot artists who plan to rob the homes of renowned Belgian artists. Inside the home of the first victim, the artist Guillaume Bijl, an unexpected clash occurs… The dialectic between ethnography and art history will drive the phantasmagoric essay, Inside Guillaume.

The Dauphiné Giant: Fossils, Mythology, and National Identity in Early Modern France

During her residency at Camargo, Anita made substantial progress in conceptualizing her book project, now titled When We Were Giants: Fossil Bones and National Identity, 1500-1800.  Giants, it turns out, are a consistent trope throughout the early modern period in Western Europe, both in fiction and in natural history.  The discovery of giant bones across Europe only confirmed what humanist scholars (and forgers) had claimed, that at least some of our ancestors were giants and that we had been on a path of steady decline ever since distant antiquity.  These giants were often identified as national heroes, such as Siegfried or the Celtic king Theutobocus, and stories of ancient giants fed into national narratives that exalted the past, dovetailing neatly with humanist narratives that exalted Greek and Roman antiquity.  However, giant bones very soon also caused some disquiet, particularly among naturalists.  Did they really belong to giant humans? How old were they? If they were not human bones, what were they, and how did they get to Europe?  By the end of the eighteenth century, few believed these bones to be those of ancestral giants,  and new questions about time, change, place, and the nature of history emerged.  But nationalist narratives, built on three centuries of myth-making, remained.

Self-injury, breasts and femininity, and animation techniques

For the Camargo residency period, Carrie has focused on three areas of research: self-injury, breasts and femininity, and animation techniques. They will investigate self-injury and self-harm in religion, history, and current psychology. The research also concentrated on recent studies of self-harm unrelated to religious affiliation, and the varied responses to these similar practices. Self-injury is often met with hostility in the American health industry, so they are curious to find the differences in Europe and what treatment methods are applied. They will investigate the relationship between femininity and breasts to explore gender non-conforming people, and histories of going outside of the gender binary in other cultures. They also used this time to explore animation techniques and take in works at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara

Signs in Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara considers how contemporary writers and filmmakers transform the reductive and dangerous ways in which the African Sahara has long been mapped. Taking off from a premise that maps are political fictions that reflect and facilitate state violence, Jill ask : what might happen if aesthetic works—films, photographs, novels—are taken seriously as cartographic acts that challenge ongoing forms of imperialism that presently (dis)organize our worlds?  
This book is a literary extension of recent historiographic work that rightly envisions the Sahara not as empty periphery but as vital and heterogeneous center. The enduring caricature of the Sahara as a dangerous void in need of civilizing control is one with a long cartographic history. For centuries, the Sahara served as a shifting symbolic and geographical horizon of French empire, a natural barrier against which the borders of the Algerian colony specifically and the French empire more broadly were drawn and redrawn. In 19th and 20th century cartographies, the Sahara appeared both as a blankness that beckoned with economic possibility and a threat that posed tremendous resistance to colonizing aims. This longstanding impression of emptiness and danger continues to prove useful to imperial and neoimperial interests.
The book’s opening chapter—and primary focus of my work at Camargo—focuses on a small Algerian village named Mertoutek that appears in the 2016 documentary film At(h)ome, by the filmmaker Elisabeth Leuvrey and photographer Bruno Hadjih. The residents of Mertoutek were in the direct path of a radioactive cloud released during the worst nuclear ‘accident’ in French history in May 1962. This bomb, ‘Béryl’, was one of seventeen nuclear weapons detonated by the French military in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966. At(h)ome combines image and sound to chart an invisible territory of unknown dimension—that of the deadly afterlife of French atomic violence in the Sahara. These detonations were designed to be secret and invisible except in carefully choreographed media propaganda, and knowledge of this history has almost completely vanished from public memory despite widespread international protest at the time (including 11 sessions of debate at the UN). At(h)ome is an aesthetic cartography of an archival blank zone where taboos on naming the toxic trauma of French colonial violence intersect with the present nuclear secrets of both the French and Algerian nation-states.  
A second chapter investigates the sonic qualities of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu (2014). The Sahara has been framed as empty, invisible, menacing, and silent, and the ancient city of Timbuktu often sounds like the name of a place so remote and unreal that it is taken to be fiction. Originally titled Timbuktu, le chagrin des oiseaux, Sissako’s film depicts that city’s 2012 occupation by Ansar al-Din. The film is an act of sonic mapping that sounds out a recessed translingual sonic, poetic, and musical archive. Sissako’s sounding-out of this threatened archive invites spectators to cultivate modes of listening that detect alternate forms of knowledge and of history.  

Frame of Mind

Rewriting the treatment for a feature length animated film about memory, creativity and perception.
This film follows one woman's quest to keep creating, as she lives with a rare memory condition. We observe the work Rita creates and also the manner/order in which she creates it, thereby learning more about her own condition. Her work consists of animated interviews with people about neurological phenomena, such as hallucinations, face blindness, synesthesia, loss of proprioception and motion blindness. These self-imposed assignments are her way of holding on to her identity, and a way of exploring, subconsciously, what is happening to her.
The segments created by Rita are animated in different techniques, her effort to express different modes of perception in the best way she knows how. We see sections in paint-on-glass, sand animation, painted plastic cut-outs, paper puppets and charcoal animation. But we also see sections animated from what we come to realize are Rita's personal photos, which help us learn more about what she is experiencing. As the film progresses the viewer realizes that the film itself is in fact, an artifact: Rita's current, and forever final, film, which she is adding to without ever finishing.
At Camargo the treatment for this project was reconfigured and re-written, ready to be fleshed out in the script stage. Animated tests were also conducted to use in a teaser trailer for the project.

Dreaming Gave Us Wings (Rêver nous donna des ailes)

Dreaming Gave Us Wings recontextualizes the myth of flying Africans as a factual historical occurrence. In this self portrait series the body experiences a physical conjuring of flight to remove self and black women from an oppressive world and find peace in the psychic space. Synonymous with liberation, levitation is a mode of transportation between time and space. Dreaming activates hidden archives where stories occupy the physical and spiritual realm. Inspired by the importance of afrodiasporic flight within folklore and history, these images house a deep remembrance of survival and freedom.

Something in the Air

During her residency at the Camargo Foundation, Cheryl Pope focused on fragrance, sculpting poetic scents inspired by new intersections.

Esprit de sel (Spirit of salt)

The Museon Arlaten, a museum dedicated to the ethnography of Provence, located in Arles, and the Camargo Foundation invited artist Guylaine Renaud and cellist Guillaume Saurel for a residency to create a concert inspired by salt objects from the museum collection, which explores the world of salt workers in the region of Camargue. They performed during a concert at the Camargo Foundation on June 8, 2019.

Kansala (a novel)

Whilst in residence at Camargo, Felwine Sarr wor on the writing of an historical novel entitled Kansala. Kansala is the capital of Gabou, an animist Negro-African empire that existed in the Guineo-Senegambian region from the 13th to the 19th century. Gabou was founded by Tiramagan Traoré, a general of Sunjata Keita. Around the 19th century, in the Senegambian region, Fulani monarchies begin to Islamise the region through Jihaad. The Gabou refuses to convert to the new religion and announces a decisive battle in Kansala, the capital. Janke Wali, the emperor of Gabou decides to hold the throne of Kansala and to resist despite his advisor’s prediction of certain defeat and the end of his empire. He exiles his sister Sira and his brother Maissa to the Niomi, in the northwestern part of the empire, in an effort to save the niaanco (royal nobility of Gabou), so that the lineage does not disappear. Gabou is at its peak with the Atlantic trade in gold, ivory and slaves with the Portuguese, French and English. The Fulani of Futa Jallon also see in the fall of Gabou, the possibility of having access to the sea and of profiting from this trade. Felwine Sarr wants to tell the story of the end of a world, and specifically how the Kaabunke faced this, knowing that there was no other solution. But also, that of a life which is reborn elsewhere by the exile of Sira and Maissa towards the Niomi.

New work for 16 voices

During this residency, Jack Sheen has developped a new work for sixteen solo voices. Each singer will have their own autonomous part, operating as an individual rather than part of a coordinated ensemble. Much of his music evades dramatic linear narratives in music, often through simple ideas such as repetition and stasis, whilst questioning more elusive notions such as memory, expectation, and climax. Through this piece Sheen aims to further probe these ideas, balancing large blocks of material alongside and on-top of one another in an almost sculptural way.

Approximations of Light

She is working on a book about the intersection of family and national secrets in the nuclear city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is interested in the stories we tell about ourselves, personally, publicly, culturally, the stories institutions tell, and the intersections and fissures between them. In Cassis, she plans to research the ITER project, the world's largest experimental fusion reactor, which proposes to build a star on Earth, while meditating on the characteristics, causes, and consequences of brilliance, both literal and figurative.

All-American Mexican

“All-American Mexican” is a poetry project that grapples with belonging and how, for a person of colour living in the United States, the need for acceptance often encourages a kind of assimilation that causes tension between assimilator and hometown/culture. Torres is interested in the term “All-American” and what it implies: a denotation of excellence (i.e. All-American Foods Inc.); and how a person (traditionally white, American males, i.e. Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy) can self-identify. Considering his heritage, he was interested in how he himself is, can, and cannot be All-American.

Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna

Former Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow, Imani Uzuri, continued researching for her forthcoming work Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna, a large multi-movement theatrical orchestral and choral work celebrating the iconography of the holy and controversial Black Madonna through the lens of Black feminine sacredness and sexuality. As a 2019 Composer in Residence at Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, Uzuri visited Black Madonna shrines in Marseilles and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, integrate her research from previous international Black Madonna sojourns and begin developing the libretto and composing the score for her forthcoming aformentioned large music work Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna.

Rethreading Black Masculinity

Tapestry artist Noel W Anderson conducted research at the Musee des Tapisseries in Aix-en- Provence. By cataloging, photographing, drawing and notetaking, Anderson has focused his time on documenting the materiality of the 17th and 18th French weavings found in the Museum collection. He incorporated material choices, observed at the museum, in the weaving of his tapestries.

The Echoes of the Breaths

In collaboration with artist Katharina Pelosi, Kathrin Wildner "re-listened" to the sound work she produced in August 2018 in Marseille during her residency at the FRAC Provence-Alpe-Côte d'Azur, as part of her project Le souffle de la Joliette. These sounds, made from field recordings, interviews, and audio diaries, highlight several aspects of the Marseille port area such as traffic, demolitions, construction sites and the "executive noise" of new office buildings and shopping centers.
Over time, in this part of the city, new soundscapes have emerged as a result of this urban transformation, political movements, and the emergence of new forms of daily resistance. Beyond the different sound strata, new rhythms, new materials, and new narratives appear.
During their residency at the Camargo Foundation, located a day's walk from Marseille, Kathrin Wildner and Katharina Pelosi worked on the echoes of this urban noise by asking themselves a question: What happens to this sound material when listened to from Cassis?

Empire of inequality: the politics of taxation in the French colonial empire, 1900-1950s

Madeline’s dissertation is a fiscal history of French imperialism from 1900 to the late 1950s and explores a crucial function of French colonial states: their ability to tax. Taxation was an important tool of colonial domination and a fundamental lever for capitalist penetration and development. It underpinned the French colonial project and crudely exposed the nature of economic relations. Colonial tax structures and policies were thus constantly resisted and debated, requiring careful handling by French colonial authorities. This political history of French colonial taxation seeks to demonstrate the centrality of taxation in the evolution and undoing of French colonialism. It innovates by bringing political economy back into the history of French colonial rule and provides the first book-length study of French colonial taxation. Based on extensive archival research in France, Algeria, and Vietnam, it follows the evolution and diversity of attitudes towards taxation in the French colonies and protectorates of North Africa, tropical Africa, and Southeast Asia.  The focus is put squarely on the functioning of colonial budgetary politics and their impact on colonial societies but also on the distributional conflicts which arose between the metropole and its empire.
At Camargo, she worked on three different chapters and completed two. One is about the politics of fiscal assimilation between the metropole and one specific colony, Algeria. It focuses on the abolition of the impôts arabes in 1918 and debates about economic inequality in colonial Algeria. The aim is to show that the First World War marked a crucial break in the fiscal history of French imperialism and that it started in Algeria. The other chapter that Madeline worked on has to do with the politics of tax competition in the French empire during the interwar period. It examines an important tax dispute between the metropole, colonial business interests, and colonial states about the allocation of taxable business income in the French empire. This chapter was especially challenging to write as it required substantial parallel reading on the history and theory of tax competition and international tax governance. The experience was very rewarding however as these issues are now at the center of current public interest in France and the US. Finally, she was able to prepare an advanced draft of a chapter on the politics of tax resistance in the French empire during the Great Depression, where she proposes to compare different tax-related revolts in the Maghreb, West Africa, and Indochina throughout the 1930s.  While researching and writing, Madeline also read many articles and books related to her dissertation in the library. Furthermore, she was very fortunate to be living close to the Centre des Archives Nationales de l’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence. She went multiple times during her Camargo residency in order to fill in blanks in her archival research or to consult books not available online.

[let the sea eat me: to perform a ferry]

During his residency at Camargo, Mohamed worked on his project [let the sea eat me: to perform a ferry], which is a new episode of his long-term project, that thinks through the history of different phases of fugitives/renegades such as immigrants, mercenary, tourists, rovers, queers, and exiles, and their relation to the sea as dissimilarity zone. At Camargo, Mohamed worked in parallel on other projects as they were all related to performance and gastronomy studied from a topographical perspective on cities and the increasing number of their inhabitants' communities.He had the chance to discover, amongst other things, a poem by Warsan Shire, thanks to one of his Fellows' counterparts Bishupal Limbu: "you have to understand,that no one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land"Warsan Shire's poem led him to focus on the relation of immigrants' waves and the dangers of the sea: the attempts to cross the sea or to get into the water escaping from an unsafe land as if there was a sea/land dichotomy. I have the intention to go beyond the contemporary crisis context and to look at the history of the relationship between humankind and the sea/water. During his stay, Abdelkarim wrote various texts, poetries and essays, drew and took pictures which will later serve as research material and tools for his performance project. He also spent some time in Marseille to get to know the city and its inhbaitants by collecting images, observations and hearsays. Finally, Mohamed adopted a new routine over the weeks in Cassis, which consisted in drinking his morning coffee downtown, while working, reading, and writing in the music/conference room of the Foundation.

The Passage to Marseille: Colonial Subjects and the Psychiatric Imagination in a Southern French Asylum, circa 1900

Between 1897 and 1914, the French colonial government transported 144 West African mental patients from Senegal to Marseille to be institutionalized within an asylum known as l’Asile de St-Pierre. Katie Kilroy-Marac’s project examines the ideas about race, civilization, and madness that were articulated in and through this colonial experiment, and that emerged out of the encounter between French doctors and African patients at St-Pierre circa 1900.  Building on historical and archival research, Kilroy-Marac’s project also takes a close look at the city of Marseille during this period, not as a mere backdrop to this story, but as a city that was actively attempting to cultivate its reputation as a “colonial city” par excellence.  In no event was this aspiration more apparent than in Marseille’s Colonial Exposition of 1906.

During her residency at the Camargo Foundation, Kilroy-Marac outlined and drafted two articles. The first article, titled The Passage to Marseille: Colonial Subjects and the Psychiatric Imagination in a Southern French Asylum, circa 1900, takes a close look at the medico-scientific encounter at l’Asile de St-Pierre and examines the ways in which African psychiatric patients were described as exhibiting “elementary” forms of madness in relation to their European counterparts. Kilroy-Marac considers this assessment in light of larger shifts in French colonial policy that were taking place during that same time—shifts from ideals of assimilation to more “pragmatic” policies of association, especially in French West Africa.  She demonstrates how, for example, African patients interned at St-Pierre were scrutinized for signs of assimilability (or its impossibility) and described in terms of their radical alterity.  This was a colonial psychiatric encounter, she argues, through which racial difference and distance—as well as the possibilities and limits of the civilizing process, and even French modernity and French identity itself—came to be imagined and articulated. Kilroy-Marac’s second article, titled A Bridge and Many Crossings, takes a more literary approach as it tells a story about Marseille as a city of colonial encounter during this period. Finally, Kilroy-Marac’s time at Camargo afforded her the opportunity to begin experimenting with and laying the groundwork for a more creative art-based project that will draw on the archival materials (including ship manifests, patient medical certificates, postcards, and news articles) she has collected along the way.

Beyond Flight and Stasis: Refugees, Human Rights, and Literary Narrative

During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, Bishupal Limbu continued working on his book, provisionally entitled Beyond Flight and Stasis: Refugees, Human Rights, and Literary Narrative, which examines the representational conventions that surround and shape the figure of the refugee. Although recent events have refocused public attention on refugees and migrants, forced displacement is not a new phenomenon. In the twentieth century alone, the Second World War, the formation of India and Pakistan, the establishment of Israel, the Vietnam War, and other similar upheavals pushed millions of people across borders and onto boats. Current scholarship on refugees often situate them in the larger context of human rights and humanitarianism, noting that humanitarian practices transform refugees into citizens of humanity but that humanity itself is a fictive and suspicious identity that humanitarian practices produce in the essentialized form of a suffering or victimized other. Building upon this framework, Limbu’s book investigates how contemporary literature and film can create and disseminate alternative notions about refugees that go beyond the common tropes of wounded victim or undeserving profiteer.
At Camargo, Limbu researched and wrote a chapter that explores the nature and characteristics of refugee narratives by analyzing Dheepan, Jacques Audiard’s award-winning film on Sri Lankan refugees in France, alongside literary fiction by two diasporic Sri Lankan writers. What is a refugee narrative? How is it framed by humanitarian expectations and concerns? How do certain narratives thematize, evade, or interrupt this framing? This chapter argues that the most politically productive and theoretically astute narratives involving refugees are often the ones that are embedded in interesting and unexpected formal and aesthetic choices. Dheepan, for instance, mobilizes genre (most notably the banlieue film) and stages time in a particular way to recount a refugee tale whose spatial and temporal dimensions exceed and unsettle the conventional boundaries of refugee experience. The chapter develops these ideas while simultaneously engaging with the critically important notions of asylum, hospitality, and the everyday.

While at Camargo, Limbu also organized regular screenings and discussions of recent films about refugees with the participation of the other fellows in residence.

Rethinking the “Unsuccessful Gentrification” in Marseille: a Reconsideration of the Role of Residents for a Comparative Sociology of Gentrifying Cities in France-Japan-U.S.

This study focuses on the role of residents in the process of gentrification in the center of Marseille. The inner-city of Marseille is an atypical and very interesting case of gentrification. On the one hand, Marseille seemingly fits perfectly into the global trends: the city council has constantly strived to alter the urban landscape, by renovating buildings and infrastructures, with the Euroméditerranée program in 2002, the National Urban Renewal Program (PNRU) from 2005 to 2015, and Marseille European Capital of Culture in 2013. Both the number of tourists and the real estate prices have strongly increased. All these attempts appear as a typical example of "state-led gentrification”. On the other hand, however, everyone agrees that gentrification does not really accelerate Marseille's development: the inner-city hasn’t yet attracted the affluent residents, and the poverty rate still remains quite high. This statement does not clearly fit into the classical schema of gentrification.

Based on a qualitative survey (participant observation and semi-structured interviews), his study looked into this “unsuccessful gentrification” thesis from a different angle to consider that this can also be treated as the success of the “resistance”, especially that of the residents (both long-term residents and new residents) against such an urban process in different forms. Even if the weight of its specific historical context must be taken into account, the case of Marseille might serve as a kind of model for the anti-gentrification resistance in a time when the protests against gentrification occur in more and more cities all over the world. However, the process of gentrification in Marseille requires further observation and investigation to contribute to the construction of a sociological theory of gentrification taking account of different national contexts, especially those of France, Japan and the U.S.

The Voice and its Translations

During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, Fernando finished the composition of his upcoming sound-theater piece, Réplicas ('aftershocks') for actor, singer, flute, bass clarinet, percussion, harp, double bass and electronics, based on a text by Irène Gayraud. This piece, commissioned by Ircam, will be premiered at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers in Paris, and will be performed by Marina Ruiz (singer), Yann Boudaud (actor) and Court-circuit ensemble during  Manifeste-2018.

“An earthquake has just happened. The earth keeps shaking. The aftershocks ('replicas' in Spanish) follow one after another. Was this telluric movement the great earthquake expected during the last hundred years? Or are these smaller and repetitive seisms just the precursory movements of a much more powerful and devastating earthquake?”

This geological event launches the script of this dramatic-musical piece. The text, by mixing different types of discourses of heterogeneous genres (poetry, political speech, scientific discourse, conversation / argument, confession / confession, etc.), explores human attitudes, emotions, and reactions when confronted to the uncertainty of the permanent alert, and suggests how the human voice could translate them. The title of the piece, Réplicas, is thus understood (as in Spanish) in a polysemic way: réplicas as telluric movements, réplicas as speeches or responses in a theatrical sense, réplicas as human reactions to danger and alert, and finally réplicas as reproduction or translation of an original material (the human voice) into music.

To Name It Is to See It

Ngô's research-based practice connects personal and political histories using a conceptual, interdisciplinary, and often collaborative approach. Having grown up as a refugee in the American South, she interrogates the ways in which power is bound up with language and identity and creates work that reframes the hybrid, the imperfect, and the non-fluent as sites of survival and knowledge. At the Camargo Foundation, she further developed the project To Name It Is to See It that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. In this project, begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer and continued as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016), she engages the colonial police records and other primary source material gathered in France and Vietnam about the anti-colonial resistance leader Nguyen Thi Minh Khai to create work that speaks to the forgotten histories of women in the movement, their intersectional struggles, and ingenious strategies of evasion. The work, including photographs, textiles, prints, neon, video, sound, and sculpture, fleshes out identity and visibility as territories that both colonizer and colonized manipulate to achieve personal agency or state sovereignty. It focuses a lens on an important blind spot: the place of the colonized, female body in historical narratives about the resistance against authoritarian regimes.

While at Camargo, Huong was able to acquire and translate some crucial materials from the Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer for a few upcoming aspects of her ongoing project To Name It Is to See It. She was also able to delve into francophone literature written about Vietnamese women in the colonial context for an upcoming book project. Finally, she was able to connect with scholars and artists who have overlapping interests in questions of colonial history, identity, and language.

Isolario: Book II

During the Core Fellowship, Christopher Trapani completed three pieces and began gathering materials for another. The centerpiece of his work was Creux, a new composition for Ensemble C Barré and electronics, supported by the GMEM, and premiered at the 2018 Festival Les Musiques in Marseille. Creux is a work very much infused with local atmosphere. It incorporates and transcribes field recordings made on the Camargo campus, the sounds of waves washing up against rocks and dragging stones back into the surf. Its calm veneer with flurries of detailed ornamentation was inspired by the imposing view of the vast, flat sea off of the terrace.
During the fellowship Christopher travelled often into Marseille to work with members of the ensemble, exploring custom playing techniques on the cymbalum, retuning a Fender Rhodes, recording African kalimba sounds with a percussionist, and realizing the electronic component of the work in collaboration with a computer music designer. Christopher also composed a short étude for solo electric guitar and delay pedal, premiered in Darmstadt in July 2018, and another work commissioned by the 2018 Ravenna Festival. For this piece, titled Stellazione, Christopher worked with his electric guitar and Camargo’s piano, creating a web of pulsating chords that lulls listeners into a hypnotic state.
Finally, in accordance with the fellowship proposal, Christopher began collecting recordings and organizing material for the upcoming project Isolario: Book II, a new series of miniatures for string quartet and electronics, to be premiered by the Spektral Quartet in Chicago in May 2019.

No Victor, No Vanquished

Chibuike Uzoma (b. 1992 Port Harcourt) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with painting, photography, drawing, and text. During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, he started the second phase of a broad three-part project that examines war and violence perpetrated by a state or an institution.
The project referenced the Biafra – Nigeria civil war (1967 – 1970) and got its title from a popular remark by the then head of state, Major Yakubu Gowon, in declaring that the gruesome event was a situation of "No Victor, No Vanquished". This statement was actually false and the after effects of the civil war continue to divide the country under the guise of religious and ethnic conflict. To contextualize the project more broadly, Chibuike Uzoma used archival materials from the civil war as well as the historical iconography of WWI and WWII in his paintings and photographs to encourage the need for reconciliation and open-ended discussions around such issues.

Lisa Fittko, Crossing Point

During her residency at the Camargo Foundation, Alyssa Verbizh worked on a film project she had been developing for a long time: Lisa Fittko, Crossing Point. This film will be an adaptation of the memoirs of Austrian Jewish resistant Lisa Fittko. Alyssa will retrace Fittko's journey in 1940 and 1941 across occupied France by using extracts from her first-person narrative story, Escape through the Pyrenees, and several archival sources and 2D animation sequences. The film intends to truly personify the character, and offer the audience an immersive experience and direct experience of Fittko's adventures.

In Cassis, Alyssa Verbizh had the opportunity to work on many strands of the project: first of all, she completed the general framing of her subject by reading books and documents about German exiles in the South of France in 1940-41. She carried out archival research at the Archives Municipales des Bouches-du-Rhône. With the assistance of the Camargo Foundation and through her own readings, she contacted historians from Aix-Marseille University. She also met Cassis inhabitants who provided her with documents and photographs of the area in the 1940s. She spent time filming and recording sounds and images from the places described in Lisa Fittko’s memoirs, retracing her path in Cassis and Marseille. During her residency, Alyssa also finished writing a major part of the film script. Finally, she came across other information and learned of addititional archival sources on other German exiles in France in the 1940s that she may incorporate into this project or use for a larger one.

Before the Apocalypse: Cortazar in Provence

When Cortázar bought a house in the minuscule commune of Saignon, in the outskirts of Provence, the only logical question to ask him was whether or not he was a surrealist (he was not). Such a question must be understood in its bafflement and even alarm: it is not easy, after all, to live this close to Artaud and Sade, although it is also true that it is not easy to live anywhere. That he was a surrealist Cortázar would deny until his grave, but that Provence shook his oeuvre to the core is a hypothesis that remains open.

The project undertook during the 8-week residency at the Camargo Foundation sought to retrace Cortázar’s real and fictional steps in the region and to write, from this experience, an essay on his life and work. This essay – which draws from experiencing the local landscape and local customs, reading Cortázar’s diaries and correspondence, and mapping out which projects and books he was working on while in the region – will be included as one of the chapters of his upcoming book on 20th-century literature called After the Apocalypse: A Latin-American Survival Guide.

Mmiri: Origin Stories

During her stay in Cassis, Alexandria wrote and developped the narrative for a forthcoming experimental film project titled Mmiri: Origin Stories in collaboration with filmmaker and conceptual artist Devin Cain. Additionally, Alexandria continued her research on surrealism and surrealist practices coming from West Africa and the Caribbean.

Governing Bodies

Governing Bodies is a lyrical exploration into our complicated relationship with the natural and urban world and how we find truth, beauty and compassion to combat violence and complacency in our daily lives. It is a work of creative nonfiction that blends, memoir, history and reportage. Governing Bodies is an inquiry into both nature and governance and looks at the ways bodies—human bodies, animal bodies, bodies of land and bodies of  water—are controlled, protected and/or liberated. It examines the tensions and possibilities of blurring the boundaries between city and nature.

Kafka for Kids

Kafka For Kids is a cross-generic film, combining a fiction drama with a documentary and a musical. The narrative premise presents the film as a pilot for a TV series that aims to make Franz Kafka’s stories palpable for toddlers. The story delivered in the pilot is The Metamorphoses. The televised format includes commercial breaks which will become gradually longer and less predictable, until eventually they evolve into separate segments. These lead to another juxtaposition of children and the law, a key concept for Kafka, when a fictive legal expert delivers a lecture on the way the Israeli military law defines constitutes childhood in the occupied territories. 

Inside Voice

Inside Voice depicts an organ in a state of becoming. It was inspired by Nathan's recent work exploring a new organ by Fisk that is being installed in Philadelphia. At that point, many of the ranks were in place, but some were not. Therefore the keys would always produce air through the system of hoses, but when certain stops were engaged (those with no pipes installed) they produced only filtered white noise. It is a wonderful sound. Other stops were installed but not voiced, therefore sounding much less polite than one expects from an organ. A glimpse inside the workings of a living instrument, this was a moment that will not happen again — neither in performance nor until some 150 years hence when this organ is in an advanced state of decay.
Translating these sonorities for ensemble, both metaphorically and musically, the musicians form a human bellows and tracker system. Each instrument has a microphone, which can be selectively unmuted by using a midi keyboard as a network of virtual valves. The air sounds are further filtered and spatialized, together with the plucked transients, within the speaker array in a system developed with the assistance of GMEM and Charles Bascou.

My Father's FBI File

Sadie’s project uses the FBI’s 500-page surveillance file kept on her father during his time in the Black Panther Party as source material for drawings and installations. She appropriates the files’ black and white type, officious markings and redactions by rendering pages in graphite, adorned with rhinestones and splashed with pink spray paint, to reframe her father's story. She creates a historical tapestry through which she reclaims the material from the framework of repressive forces intent on dismantling the Black Panthers and present an authentic telling of her family tree and American history.

The Total People

While at Camargo, Abigail and Michael (600 HIGHWAYMEN) developed two new works: The Total People, a large-scale performance that uses upwards of 150 singers to investigate how singing in public is a humanely revealing and transformative act, and Untitled, a work about spectatorship and romance.

Maps & Islands

The goal of the project was to question languages and practices associated with the use of a map and its materiality. They considered cartography as a field of exploration and of visual, practical, and theoretical propositions.
This question concerns more specifically the cartography of islands. Islands are geographic realities, but also viewpoints from where the state of the world and its spaces can be questioned. The island can also be understood as a metaphor and a sketch of human thought and perception. The map of an island is an image of how people represent the world and its inhabitants. The cartography of islands, which at first had nautical purposes, could be interpreted as a reproduction of the point of view and of the way of life of island people.
The study focused on a body maps that are both modern and contemporary, scientific and artistic, coming from very different cultural and geographical areas. Research were intrinsically interdisciplinary, crossing different point of views such as history, geography, philosophy, aesthetics, economy, art, etc.

Lonely Planet

During his residency, Matthew Chamberlain worked on a piano solo commissioned by Fondation Royaumont for Claudia Chan. Titled Lonely Planet, the piece explores a radical asymmetry between its material resources: while it is texturally confined to chordal homophony, its harmonies are rigorously diverse, drawn stochastically from a massive database of all physically playable chords on the piano. In light of this asymmetry, the piece enacts a process central to all of our lives: in ignorance, it searches for somewhere to make a home.

O Kim?

"Recently there has emerged a peculiar tendency to name my works with the Turkish demonstrative ‘O’ which in English roughly corresponds to ‘that’ or ‘this’". Cengiz Eren already has a number of pieces in his catalogue that contain this somewhat mystical word in combination with another short word (O yer, _ODA, O kişi). O Kim? is another one of these works that bring about this obsession. In this upcoming work, he set up an abstract narrative that conveys a single entity struggling to come into being; a sound identity attempting to garner adequate justification to exist.

Ethos

Ethos is a trilogy of operatic scale experimental dance and music performance to elevate awareness of the intangible wisdom across different cultures of ancient Greek, Chinese and Native American/First Nation. The Ethos applies the Art Deco glasswork technique intercalaire (inserted), established when Emile Gallé was influenced by Japonisme. The project envisioned the ethos of a new age internally, externally, synchronically, diachronically and multidimensionally. At Camargo Foundation, Ayako conducted intensive literature, dramaturgic and movement research, overseeing the Mediterranean Sea.

Trauma, Identity, Memory, and the Journey to Black Nationhood

There is power in the unity of a people; be it physical, spiritual, creative or ideological. The proposed research, Trauma, Identity, Memory, and the Journey to Black Nationhood—and its creative imperative—explored the present state of black identity and how the power of the celebrated culture of black storytellers through their tools of language, culture, music and rituals can stir the hive of history for relevant memories and help redefine black identity, heal collective trauma, and forge a path to black nationhood where Africa and African diaspora speak in a distinct ideological voice.

Deux Femmes on the Edge de la Revolution

A pig is slaughtered and sacrificed, a goddess seduces a young bride, and enslaved and self-liberated Africans on the island of San Domingue rise up to end slavery and destroy colonialism. Deux Femmes on the Edge of a Revolution is a full-length play about the Haitian Revolution, told from the perspective of two women. Cécile, an enslaved healer of African nobility, and Valentine, a French woman sold into marriage to a plantation master form an unlikely alliance as they fight to preserve their pasts, protect their futures, and ultimately gain freedom.

The Value Project

The Value Project is an artistic investigation of human value. The idea came to the author when she learned that approximately 21 million people are enslaved around the world today and most of us benefit from their blood without even knowing it. The play will depict three separate slave auctions. One will take place in 1619, another will be a digital auction in the 22nd Century, and the third will be a contemporary setting where young liberals will attempt to justify owning human beings. Despite the gravity of the topic, there will be a lot of humor though the laughs won’t always be comfortable.

AfroRoma

AfroRoma is both a scholarly memoir exploring the relationship between African, European and North American History, art, and popular culture, with a modern day twist and focused lens on the Black Madonna, as well as the creation of a romantic comedy based on an African-American woman’s summer in Europe.

The Africa-Diaspora Triad Three Plays on African-Americans and the beginnings of African Independence (2): Maya Angelou

In the late 1950s, when many African countries gained political independence, progressive African-Americans were encouraged by the new African leaders to come and help in nation-building. Ghana in particular, under the dynamic Kwame Nkrumah, attracted figures like WEB DuBois, Maya Angelou, and so on. But what was the result of this interaction between the Africans and their guests? What were the mutual gains or losses? How can these help us construct a more propitious future? Femi started exploring these questions in his earlier play, A Nightingale For Dr Dubois, and now wishes to continue, by looking at Maya Angelou.

Dogs and Pigs, An African Journey to Sexual Freedom

Dogs and Pigs: An African Journey to Sexual Freedom is a theatrical project that seeks to uncover the veil of LGBTQI rights and issues in a country and continent with strong traditional and political convictions set firmly against people who identify as LGBTQI. The project is inspired by public denouncement of LGBTQI people as UnAfrican and worse than dogs and pigs, and their persecution as they fight for recognition. Dogs and Pigs is an interrogation of the influence of the liberated African Diaspora on the issue of sex and sexuality and homosexuality in traditional African setups.

The Diaspora Cycle

In the spirit of August Wilson’s Pittsburg Cycle, a body of work encompassing ten full length plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, illuminating the African-American experience. The Diaspora Cycle chronicles generations of a single family originating in West Africa in the 15th century, following their lineage to modern day descendants in the United States, in the form of ten 10-minute plays. The multigenerational saga explores the role of inextricable tradition, trauma and joy across centuries and continents. Each 10-minute play is a stand-alone piece, and simultaneously crafted to be performed as a whole, assembling a full-length play. These pieces may be performed in varying order creating the opportunity to tell this story with a fresh perspective each time, and with significant input from the production team.

Transnational Nomadism and Cultural Transfer: Drama in Mobility

This project investigated the functions of dramatic texts in mobility as well as the political factors responsible for their circulation. Although there is a strong focus on textual mobility, other areas of focus include their functionality as one of the modes of post-colonial transition. It may be useful to consider them as independent cultural objects in mobility. The principal concern for this project was the politicization of texts and performances by epistemic communities as a means toward specific purposes such as accentuation of cultural identity and Nationalist ideologies. Jallo approaches this topic with the idea that the principal factor accountable for drama in transnationalism is a paradigmatic shift from traditional theatre to literary theatre. There have been representations of Nigerian theatre troupes in festivals from as early as the 1940s in Europe, but this project concerns itself with professional/academic theatre where emphasis is not necessarily placed on performance creation but on dramatic creation. Ultimately the project investigates the modes of deterritorialization of the space of performance and how temporarily, the idea of rootedness is transformed into the habitation of a new space.

Approaches

Any door, even one that is open, marks a separation of the inside to the outside. In his project Approaches, Ryo Abe wanted to imagine a natural architecture, leaving behind ideas of borders. Port-Miou, this immense "interstice" more or less abandoned to nature where people pass through rather than stop to appreciate, has the potential to let us imagine a symbiosis between human and nature, offering an experience as opposed to a simple entry point. Ryo Abe’s idea is best imagined as a thread that marks the path through the calanque. A thread that reinterprets our relationship with nature. Certain boundaries are passed more obviously than others: the end of the tarmac, that of the marked track… but the thread serves to link past, present and future, creating a bridge between the users of the park to the biodiversity and landscape. Port-Miou could be landscaped with the help of residents, researchers and park users to offer a complete "summary" of all the calanques: large open spaces in front of the sea; pathways that lead us away from the town and invite us to become encompassed by nature; an access to the sea-front; to information on biodiversity, history and patrimony; a recreational point; a space for both scientific study and culture.

In 2018, the seed for this vast project has been planted. In 2019, Ryo Abe is back to pursue this work. What if, instead of being simply a space that we pass through to reach the calanques further along, this old industrial site that the pines try to hide, abandoned but never reintegrated back into nature, became an experimental garden ? The idea has already begun to grow through those who have met and discussed with Ryo Abe. It is taking root by our desire to welcome and to feel welcomed by nature.

Dark Heat

Over the last decades, scientists have been arguing about the existence of a form of communication between plants: apparently, plants transmit information through electrical signals and chemistry. Happening beyond human perception, this communication could be one of the many phenomena that occur in the invisible part of our environment. At Camargo, Julien Clauss plans to observe indirectly plant communication to create an aesthetic experience for the public: participatory readings via community radio, video streaming of infrared observations, and paintings made of toxic waste.

Invisible

At Camargo, Nicolas Floc’h further developped his ongoing research and started new projects as well. He  pursued his photographic work on artificial reefs and natural habitats within the Mediterranean ecosystem. Moreover he continued the work he started at the marine laboratory of Wimereux on the color of water and bioluminescence. Among the new projects, he undertook research about submarine geomorphology and its impact on the environment.

Boundaries

The Calanques National Park contains several boundaries. It encompasses frictions between entities that have to coexist: the nature and the city, but also between its very users (such as hikers, inhabitants, and scientists). Franck Gérard wandered through the Park to observe the landscape. He then log his observations in a residency diary. The project will therefore represent an investigation, a reflection on our connections with nature—and especially with the idyllic environment of the Calanques National Park.

Tales of Vegetable Beings

Tales of Vegetable Beings is a work that explores human-plant entanglements. The title at once refers to the plants as beings themselves and the many ways of being together with plants. The work act as a survey of exchanges between humans and the vegetable realm, which reframes plants not as inert objects but as active agents playing important roles in the economic, social, and emotional lives of humans. The aim is to highlight the incredible two-way relationships, formed deep in our evolutionary past, that have left plant signatures in humans and human signatures in plants and reveal the ways in which we are deeply entangled with and dependent upon the non-human world around us.

Stone Alphabet

During her residency at Camargo, Katie Holten further developed her Stone Alphabet project, an attempt to create a language beyond the human. A member of Generation Anthropocene, Holten believes there is a vital need for pioneering research to visualise and help solve the challenges affecting interconnected systems of society and ecosystems. Drawing is Holten’s tool. She will attempt to draw out an "unconscious alphabet" from the Karst landscape of the Calanques. Stones leak layers of infinite knowledge. Reading and writing the stones, Holten returned to earliest forms of human communication, drawing out history, stories, lines, and letters.

An Archeology

The project An Archeology proposes a poetic archeology of the Calanques National Park. With an investigative approach, the artist conducted research on the history of the area and its uses until now. Working on drawings and photos, but also on sound recording, the idea was to collaborate with researchers to develop new projects related to the macro- and micro-scale of this area.

Work in Progress

During the residency The Calanques, Shanta Rao explored the world of jellyfish, whose growing presence on the beaches of the Calanques National Park poses questions of otherness, highlighting the link between humans and other animal species. Born from a collaboration with the researchers Guillaume Marchessaux and Justine Gadreaud, the artist’s research around cellular functioning and the metamorphic capacities of certain jellyfish led to studies associating painting, moulding and video images. These studies sought to compare various sculptural and scientific research. Following these drafts and a dialogue with the exhibition curator Raphaël Brunel, particularly around issues of morphogenesis, dissemination and invasive phenomena, an exhibition combining the work of Rao with the artist Mimosa Echard has been planned for January 2019, at the Edouard Manet Gallery / Ecole des Beaux Arts Gennevilliers.

The Unarrival Experiments

The Unarrival Experiments explored the notion of the “vaporous body” via relationships between astronomy, cosmology, time, Blackness, and premature death. Dark matter and dark energy serve as portals to interrogating spaces of the unknown, yet that which have an unequivicated impact on the composition of the universe. This interdisciplinary project asks: “How do you see something you can’t see?”; “What if Blackness refused to arrive and exists in the unarrival?”; “What is the nature of antebecoming?".

El Pueblo de los Olvidados (The Village of the Forgotten)

El Pueblo de los Olvidados ("The Village of the Forgotten") a performance in the genre of science-fiction, prompted by Antonio's Ramos research about Puerto Rico in the wake of natural disaster—Hurricane Maria. The narrative of this work sees the protagonist, Tony Tacon, returning to his native planet to discover the country’s devastation under the colonization by the alien species, FIMA. Beyond being repurposed as a spot for resting and rejuvenation, Puerto Rico hosts a base for a top-secret laboratory where the invaders develop a powerful new weapon that has the ability to extract water from other planets, leaving devastating droughts in its wake. FIMA’s efforts further complicate matters as the infusion of alien flora and fauna gives rise to a new, diverse, trans-sexual species with multiple mammaries and sexual organs. In this new environment, Tony Tacon has no choice but to leave his glorious glitter shell and reinvent themselves with Nature. The appeal of the exotic new land spreads to other planets. Unfortunately, the new Puerto Rico remains undetectable on navigation systems, due to FIMA’s supremacy spell which envelops the island in impossibly thick fog—so thick, that incoming vessels, including rescue ships, enter the cloud and forever disappear within. In the midst of all the hardship, a ray of light emerges as Tony Tacon discovers a secret weapon under his rapidly growing cloud of hair,that helps the native people understand the spell they had fallen into.

The Total People

While at Camargo, Abigail and Michael (600 HIGHWAYMEN) has developed their new works : The Total People, a large-scale performance  that used upwards of 150 singers to investigate how singing in public is a humanely revealing and transformative act, and Untitled, a yet-to-be-titled work about spectatorship and romance.

A blood-water-sound-waves-mixtape and the Amplitudes of Memory

Listening to the water’s songs as components of the Mediterranean’s colonial past and present, Mediterranean Drexciya approaches Europe – as terra firma, delirium of domination, power structure, monetary union – by the way of the seas’ sounds. Thinking Sea waves through soundwaves entails a record of music, poetry, and other readings to question Mediterranean memories, “solid” and “liquid traces” of historical, social and political structuring, transformations and migrations, which made the water become a space of racial brutality, violence, subversion, and the paradox of floating resistance.

Scattah Brain, composed of Jahson The Scientist (vocals), Andi Tausch (guitar) and Andreas Lettner (drums), opens eyes, draws attention to social grievances and puts its finger on the sore spots of society. Composing a new language in the form of music, the goal is not to walk down the path of least resistance or to fit into a box, but to put a powerful life symbol of humanity and rebellion into this world.

Invent Tomorrow's Europe From Aix-Marseill Metropole

Thomas Bellinck has intended to spend a big part of 2018 in the Aix-Marseille area, in order to develop a Euro-Mediterranean research project that will bring together current and future projects; to work with old and new residents of the area; to present some of these projects to local cultural organizations. Thomas was in residence at the Camargo Foundation during several periods, during which he mainly focused on his research. The artist has of course moved around in the region, but Camargo has been his base, providing him with the possibility of inviting fellow researchers of the area with whom he has collaborated during his time in France.

It is Necessary to Defend the Public City

During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, Hacène Belmessous had planned to draft an essay on the future of urban public spaces. All around the world, collective existence is disappearing, replaced by exclusive communities. What constitutes society? Are we still building "public cities" or are we merely creating illusions of such? And, in the end, are these processes destroying the idea of "Us" while undoing collective life?

Requiem

With the "Requiem" Alain Platel and Fabrizio Cassol have continued a collaboration which began with "vsprs" in 2006, and was followed by "pitié!" (2008) and "Coup Fatal" (2014). They are both kindred souls in the way they write new stories with familiar materials. The classical European repertoire is a source of inspiration, a starting point to venture out from and create a new universe by means of so-called métissages. In this new performance, the point of departure was Mozart's "Requiem". Cassol, who is always on the lookout for métissages in the music, assembles a band of African, Western and Oriental musicians for the "Requiem", with whom he has worked on previous productions. Using vocals and instruments, they have reconstructed the Requiem, mixing in their own influences with jazz and opera. On a theatrical level, Alain Platel and the group were looking for a physical and visual translation of the themes of death and farewell rituals. In addition to the musicians, two actors/dancers have joined the group on stage.

Messenger

Messenger is a piece for prepared upright-piano and prepared pianist, composed by Huihui Cheng and played by Claudia Chan. It has been commissioned by the Royaumont Festival (2017). A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sound altered by objects placed on or between its strings. What about the prepared pianist? In this piece, the pianist is wearing a costume made of objects, such as guitar strings or present tape. Those objects are placed around his.her body and connected to the upright piano's strings, as extended instruments of the piano and costume of the pianist. While the pianist plays on the piano-keys, the body-strings are also activated. This double movement accounts for the title Messenger. Huihui Cheng, as composer and performance-designer, is interested in the experiment on "performance and costume". In several of her recent pieces, costumes are crucial elements, either as sound object or visual presentation. By wearing them, the musician's performance goes beyond the music s.he plays and gains an authentic aesthetic dimension.

Fragments of an Immobile Journey

In his solo show at Art-Cade, Fragments of an Immobile Journey, Sépànd Danesh displayed a new series of paintings. He continued his experimentation of the "corner" as a place where time and movement are suspended. By placing the viewer in a position of distance, the corner is an invitation to think while it makes movement almost impossible. The corner is a gap within the continuity of time. It is also a non-place where everything can coexist, the place of dreams. The place where binarities are put aside, where the violence of language is frozen. In the difficult space of the corner, we are asked to look at things differently, to move and go beyond, both in space and in time, to leave behind the structures of a compulsory circulation. In his paintings, different elements are coming together, looking at history from a kaleidoscope: architecture in miniature (Stonehenge), fragments of an Annunciation, empty frames, structures out of context, military vehicles, everything dissolving into a psychedelic background. Sépànd Danesh has a peculiar use of paint: informed and educated, but also original and ironic. The superposition of layers and of perspectives is a feature of the medium. By drawing from these features, he invents a new way of painting. Fragments of an Immobile Journey is a promise of evasion. A horizon for Sépànd Danesh.

Witnessing Evidence

The Welcome Table, James Baldwin's unfinished final novel, examines his three-decade life as a transcontinental commuter between America and France. The book would have highlighted how artists and activists met in his Saint-Paul-de-Vence home for intimate gatherings and collective remembering about creative social justice organizing from previous decades. Witnessing Evidence, a new media project, merges original electronic music and archival footage, with original moving images and photography to engage this period in his life. In essence, Witnessing Evidence is a speculative fictional work, utilizing research and informed imagination to create a sonic visual chapter in the uncompleted book.

Thank you for Coming Part.3

While at Camargo, Faye Driscoll has begun early research and development on the final installment of his "Thank You For Coming" trilogy. He has been mapping out his ideas, reading, planning his timeline, and experimenting with methodologies. He has been incredibly inspired by the landscape and people present at Camargo. After 2 years of heavy touring and creation of Part 1 and 2 of the trilogy, his time at Camargo had encouraged him to go deeper, and take his time to make this final part with a thoughtful and sensitive approach. In this final installment, the liveness of the moment of performance and the audience's responsibility in the act of co-creation will take center stage. Part 3 will begin with a tailored, intimate moment of communion and confession with each audience member. Audience interactions are folded into the performance script each night as a writer adapts the text in the moment based on these responses. The show takes place in an open space, where the boundaries between stage and seating, playing area and area of observation are blurred. The space itself is created throughout the performance as the audience moves and helps to build it. As the performers are prompted by an ever-changing live feed via in-ear monitors, they work to intersperse the story that is created each night by the many new voices in the space with layers of set text and movement to form a collision of words and worlds. Building on the exploration of voice, body and language that drove the first two installments of the TYFC series, Part 3 would feature text that is entirely sung, and the movement structure would be created through Faye's unique approach to the study of image, language, and the making of scene and memory.

Mobility of Artists and Cultural Practitioners from the Global South

At Camargo, Khadija has wrote a reflection and drafting of the chapter "Mobility of Artists and Cultural Practitioners from the Global South", as part of the 2017 Global Report on the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the diversity of Cultural Expressions.

Interstices

Composer and musician Amir ElSaffar has spent four weeks in residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, composing a new work commissioned by the Royaumont Foundation in France. The work has been premiered by the ICTUS Ensemble at Royaumont in September, 2017. Amir ElSaffar's upcoming work has been composed for seven members of the Belgium-based chamber ensemble, ICTUS Ensemble. Instrumentation is double bass, cello, violin, viola, clarinet/bass clarinet, oboe/English horn, and French horn, with the addition of ElSaffar on trumpet and santour (Iraqi hammered-dulcimer).

Monumentalization of Power, Architecture and Urban Practices in the Balkans and the Mediterranean

This research group worked around the relations between the memory and the visible—and invisible—dimension of art and architecture in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean countries. Architectures, monuments and pieces of art exposed in public spaces are involved in a historical reformulation of speech, which allows approaching the subject of a cultural globalization (and political governance) through a micro-geographic point of view. Artists and researchers worked on the development of the project and also on a publication on-line, through experiences as workshops, seminars and meetings.

Gérard Depardieu Sacred Monster

Her time in Cassis was spent on advancing the writing of her book "Gérard Depardieu: Sacred Monster". The book examines actor Depardieu's relevance to French cinema, culture and political life, presenting him from a tripartite perspective: major film star, symbol of French national identity, and touchstone for contemporary political anxieties about the decline of French grandeur. The book analyzes the evolution of Depardieu's star persona over a fifty-year period and accounts for his versatility, professional longevity and continued celebrity in France. Her work was motivated by the conviction that Depardieu is the emblematic French film star of his generation – a rare monstre sacré (a term coined by French film theorist Edgar Morin) – who, across over 200 films since 1968, has contributed more to the shape, profile and success of the contemporary French cinema industry than any other French performer. The central argument of the book is that Depardieu's cultural significance lies in his ability to serve as a repository of evolving anxieties about French masculinity, class, citizenship and national identity. Harris particularly argued that Depardieu is divisive in France precisely because of the way he symbolizes, embodies and disseminates complex, conflicting and increasingly unwelcome ideas of Frenchness in an era characterized by a loss of historic grandeur. She contended that this has become more acute in the last decade, when his aging body – a regular target for media opprobrium – has been of increased critical interest to auteur directors concerned with the representation of the ageing star body. She managed to significantly advanced her writing of the book during her residency, and reformulate some of its thematic and structural priorities following feedback at her project discussion. She also benefitted from presenting work in progress to Camargo Fellows, doctoral students in cinema at the Université d’Aix-Marseille, and the public at the Eden Cinema in La Ciotat. Following the broadcast of the Netflix series "Marseille" (starring Depardieu) in 2016, she realized that it was a relatively weak dramatic text, and it will therefore have far less prominence in the book than she anticipated at the point when she made her application. Her focus has reverted to questions of aging and corporeality in relation to Depardieu, and much time has been spent reviewing his early films, and re-reading biographical and autobiographical material in the light of these priorities.

The Origins of Representation of Workers. A Social History of Working-Class Ideas in France in the 19th century

When Samuel Hayat arrived at the Camargo Foundation, he intended to start a book about the history of labor ideas in France in the 19th century. Building on his work on political representation during the revolution of 1848 in France, he wanted to investigate the labour origins of the Democratic and Social Republic, a distinctive republican ideology embedded in the nascent French working class. Following the methods of a social history of ideas, her aim was to document the genesis, circulation and reception of ideas and practices concerning citizenship and representation among organized workers. During his residency, this project was slightly modified and he laid the foundations for quite a different book. Hayat started writing an essay about the construction of the working class as a political subject in a more global perspective – even if the French case will be at the center of the book. The main material of the book remains texts produced collectively by workers. However, he now devoted some chapters to the socio economic transformations of the long 19th century and to the ideas and knowledge about the working class, even if not written by workers. Apart from starting writing this essay, he completed two research articles. The first one is about the politicization of French coal miners during the 19th century, based on a research on the Anzin Company. It showed that Anzin coal miners politicized through the antagonism between two orders based on different values: a managerial order and a community order. The second article he completed is about representation and embodiment in 19th century France. He also wrote an introduction to the republication of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

Horizon

Anna Huber initiated a research on the phenomenon of the horizon, which in its fascinating paradoxes, is explored in a multi-layered investigation: threshold or limitation aswell as opening, embodying the need to expand one's horizons, to move furtherand beyond and the desire for transformation. An unreachable but clearly visibleline, always present yet changing with the observers' perspective and perception, appearing and disappearing. A line as well as a surface, like a skin between water andair. Fascinated by the perpetual transformation of the sea, the light, its reflections on water, colors, textures and physical states, Huber absorbed visual and energetic impressions transforming movement into ephemeral drawings and choreographic scores, exploring the body in landscape that itself is in constant movement and change. The senses of equilibrium and orientation oscillate between stability and mobility. The fragile nature of human existence and its precarious balance create singular intensities and moments of suspension within the continuous transformation of the scenery's physical and sensorial impact. What traces do human presence and movement leave in space, landscape and memory? The research was inquiring the impact of an open horizon in opposition to a restricted and obstruct perspective. How does the wide, open perspective, only perceivable by the sea, influence the physical and mental state of being?
The Camargo Foundation's scenery with its generous panorama was the perfect place to investigate on these questions. Time, space and concentration enabled for analytical reflection on Huber's artistic approach, opening up new perspectives and directions. The necessary distance and diverse working rhythms allowed for expanding, deepening, revisiting and integrating recent artistic and somatic experiences. Anna Huber highly appreciate the exchange, serendipitous encounters and inspiring dialogues with other artists and scholars from different fields and backgrounds, sharing experiences, questions and creative processes and thus expanding various perspectives. In this open-minded atmosphere lays valuable potential for future collaborations.

Calanques Flow Maps and Drawings

While in residence at Camargo, Jill was developing a series of large scale drawings and digital pieces that look at historical changes in the geology of Cassis and the Calanques. These pieces use line quality, color, direction and other variables to encode data about natural and human forces that have altered and influenced the landscape. The flow maps of Charles Joseph Minard serve as a visual point of departure. Data visualizations developed with javascript, sensors and physical computing, and drawing are all employed in the realization of these works.

Spectral Stream

The ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble, New York) and the French new-music group Ensemble Itinéraire came together for a French-American concert. Gérard Grisey is one of the most influential composers of the second half of the 20th century. Pioneer of spectral music, he discovered a new way of composition in-between science and music, where the matter of sound is built upon its physical reality, which will become an example for many composers around the world. Christopher Trapani and Ashley Fure, two young American composers, drew their inspiration from two emblematic pieces composed by Gérard Grisey, "Partiels" et "Périodes". The core of the program is the way in which this younger generation of American composers looks at the legacy of spectral music.

Performance walks

At Camargo, Regin developed an ongoing artists' book series based on a set of performance walks. During his stay, he documented an arraty of new sketches for performances, as well as created and collected drawings as content for the books.

Cambodia, An Environmental History: from Agriculture to Angkorto the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

At the Camargo Foundation for the past eleven weeks Ben Kiernan started to wrote his new book, "Cambodia, An Environmental History: from Agriculture to Angkor to the Khmer Rouge Tribunal". Kiernan wrote a near-complete draft of Chapter One,"Agriculture Comes to Cambodia". This first involved researching (mostly online), identifying and reading a considerable scientific literature on the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, globally and in South east Asia, most particularly in Cambodia and neighboring northeast Thailand where environmental and geographyical conditions were similar, as well as reading the paleoenvironmental and archaeological literature on the appearance of human settlement and the emergence of rice agriculture in the mainland South east Asian interior. Thanks to his time in Camargo, he managed to get a grasp of this extensive literature, which then enabled him to draft the outlines of a chapter on Cambodia's environmental prehistory, from the Last Glacial Maxiumum to the mid-first millennium BCE. Towards the end of his residency he was also able to spend three days of research on Cambodia's French colonial era in the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, which was a very productive time and will prove most helpful when he started drafting Chapter Eight, "Opening up the Land: CreatingFrench Indochina (1863-1945)".

The Wide Blue Yonder

Cate Kennedy has spent six beautiful weeks at Camargo writing about a character who finds herself in isolation, surrounded by ocean…how fitting and ironic that she should also has spent her residency time looking directly over the mighty blue ocean outside her window, working in creative solitude! Kennedy new manuscript focuses on a woman alone on a small island in the South Pacific, running a tiny research station and becoming immersed in the small microcosmic natural world around her while, outside her sphere of attention, larger pressures are operating on a macro environmental level, serving to isolate her even more. When being alone no longer becomes a choice, what do we do, as humans, to reassure ourselves of our connection to each other, and to return from our self-imposed exile? What fragile ecosystems are risked in such a threatened and vulnerable world? Here looking out over the blue Mediterranean, Kennedy was far removed from the cyclone currently battering northern Australia, or the inexorable rising sea levels changing the lives of Pacific island communities forever, or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef's coral. It has often struck her what a seemingly useless thing it is to be attempting to write fiction in the face of these massive climactic catastrophes, yet Kennedy still feel compelled to return to story to look for patterns of empathy, to create narrative, to make some sense of it - for herself as much as for a reader. Kennedy hoped to be able to render this story in a way which allows others to feel these preoccupations and, like her character, consider their own connectedness, their own loneliness, and their own struggles. Time and space began to seem to her to be the only true luxuries in this world, and being offered the time and space to think, read and write here at Camargo has left an indelible impression on Kennedy work and how she then, think of.

Mobility of Discourses, Mobility of Images

In Cassis, Mohamed Ltaief (Dali) has undertaken research on issues related to Foucault's concept of rarity and on geographic mobility, with the final goal of writing a play. The wire fences in Lampedusa (Italy) are hiding tales, images, and populist discourses around fear. They represent the new security measures of contemporary imperialism against a global multiple and mixed diaspora. War is a form of domination from a geopolitical, linguistic, and aesthetic point of view. The circulation of literary and visual objects is part of the storytelling of the contemporary world. Both the "stranger" as conceptualized by Arab philosopher Abû Hayyân al-Tawḥîdî (10th century) and Foucault's understanding of the inter-relation of the inside and the outside inhabit this work. Key questions have been: how discourses about fear are produced and used? How does the extreme right in Germany fashion toxic myths and stereotypes about the outsiders to the nation? How are these discourses related to the Salafi ideology around questions of fear and otherness? In their artistic approach, Mohamedali Ltaief and Darja Stocker are interested in the dominant discourses that create values, political trends, and social movements. Even though art attempts to challenge these narratives, artistic discourses often fall in the trap of reproducing or magnifying them.

Translation of "The Monolingualism of the Other" by Jacques Derrida

At Camargo, translators Mohamed Maouhoub and Moshe Ron have translated Jacques Derrida's The Monolingualism of the Other into Arabic and Hebrew respectively. This essay questioned the relation between the subject and the language he or she uses without its being, however, quite his or her own. They have eventually discussed the specific problems arising from the translation of Derrida's text in the overall context of translating Western philosophy into non-European languages.

At The Table

As a ceramic artist, Anna Metcalfe was interested in how the objects directly connected to food can be conduits for conversation about environmentally balanced and culturally sustainable food systems. She investigated the natural and cultural ecosystems in the area around Cassis and the Calanques through personal interviews of individuals connected to food. She wrote several short vignettes about how craft, environmentalism and social engagement intersect with the research she conducts. She additionally was creating new pieces about her research and has hosted a meal with the participants.

Bladder Inn (X, Y, Y, Z)

Bladder Inn (and X, Y, Z, W) is a "writing a dance" project. The writing has been both a work of literature as well as a dance score, to be performed by 2-5 dancers. Through this new method of "writing a dance", which evolved from her recent choreographic method of using existing butoh scores, Mina Nishimura has explored how to evoke and choreograph internal landscapes. Having four characters situated in the bladder of this world, the writing explores themes such as the interconnectivity, ephemeral and eternal elements both in the internal and external realms of our bodies.

Passes

Passes has been a collaborative artwork which focused on the intersections of contemporary immigration from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, with the legacy of forced migrations of the slave trade. It has drawn on Marseille's role as a fulcrum for both forms of exchange. The research for the project has involved visiting people and places of the 21st century's northward migration, and examining historic records of leading 19th century Marseilles people-trader MM. Regis. They have highlighted the personal and cultural costs and benefits of "papers" in migrants' lives.

Border South

Raùl has been in post-production for his first feature film, Border South, which focuses on the U.S. government's efforts to deter undocumented Central American immigration by investing heavily in Mexican immigration enforcement.  This film explored the hardships and trauma that Central Americans face in their journey north, and seeks to provide immigrants themselves with a platform to tell their own stories in a way that recognizes characters' own expertise, strengths, and talent. Raùl was also in the development and research phase of an online-multimedia documentary project about U.S. detention and deportation practices in cooperation with the Detention Watch Network and American Friends Service Committee.  This project was combining video, 360° virtual reality, travelogues, and short films to uncover the complex relationships that immigration detention centers create between communities, local officials, and undocumented/refugee immigrant populations. Expanding on these projects, Raùl's career goals for the next 5 years include undertaking an artistic body of work that will encompass a series of multi-media short films highlighting undocumented immigrant communities in the US, and completing a feature film trilogy about undocumented global immigration from Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Bay of Bengal (the place with most immigrants deaths in the world). Border South is the first film of the trilogy.  During his residence in Cassis, France, Raùl has been doing research, writing a treatment and creating the story-board for the second film of the trilogy about undocumented migration from Sub-Sahara Africa into Europe and the USA.

Impossible Monuments

At Camargo, Mary Ann Peters has researched the parallels between Middle Eastern migrations today and those out of Greater Syria at the turn of the 20th century that used Marseille as a crossroads. Her interest is in historical and photographic records that might reveal minutiae integral to the hybridized cultural narrative of Arab communities in a state of flux. She has compared these findings to pedestrian accounts provided by citizen journalists in the Arab world today. The information she collected has served as a basis for an installation series titled "impossible monuments".

My Body, the Buddhist" by Deborah Hay - An Increased Translation

The aim of the research of Laurent Pichaud & Lucie Perineau was to update the literary specificity of American choreographer Deborah Hay, through the translation of her book "My Body, the Buddhist" (2000). Known for her experimentations during the choreographic avant-garde of the 1960s and still very active today, she is the author of four books (the last one published in fall 2015), twenty articles and fifteen textual dance notations, which prove, in their own way, the major role of writing as both a driving force and a tool of the choreographic process.

Yantra

Following the recent developments in Shanta Rao work, including an installation project inspired by the literary work "Flatland" (Edwin A. Abbott, 1884), Shanta Rao's research project at the Camargo Foundation involved a navigation through forms that draws upon experimental music and explored mutations between sound frequencies, musical graphic representations, and matter. Through an experimental approach of musical composition tools, sound material is reenacted into image-objects reflecting the spectral and temporal deployment of music.

Coin Coin

Matana Roberts' plan for this residency was to work on an ongoing project she has been developing since 2006 called "Coin Coin". It is a 12 part mixed media series, of sound, music, image, and collage. Her goal for the Camargo Foundation residency was to flesh out the music/sound and visual art framework for Chapter 4 of the series, which focuses on history, ancestry, witness and memory. The term "Coin Coin" is pronounced koin-koin, not to be confused with the French pronunciation or meaning. The title is related to the American name of a woman in Matana Roberts' ancestral line. Though they are not part of a book, she signifies this work in "chapters" because they are very narrative-driven. To date she has completed 3 of the 12 projected chapters that each deal with a segment of American history that fascinates, disgusts, inspires and in the end propels her to work harder on developing a mixed media creative language that leaves art legacy and builds "bridge".

Media Versus Rap: The (Self-) Representation of French Suburban Youths

Janina Shupp project "Media Versus Rap: The (Self-) Representation of French Suburban Youths" constructed a comparative analysis between media representations of the French suburban riots and the self-representation of suburban youths from Marseille and Paris through the medium of rap and music videos. This research aims to unearth the tensions and remediations inherent in modern intertextual cultural representations. The analysis critically examined how countercultural self-portraits creatively draw on the audio-visual style and stereotypical imagery attributed to these marginalized population groups through the media coverage of the urban riots in the last two decades. A particular focus of the analysis is to explore how alternative artistic channels give a voice to marginalized population groups and thus allow the contestation of stereotypical media images and a reassertion of their own identity.

Composition of a String Quartet

During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, Francisco Alvarado worked on two pieces: a stringquartet, commissioned by the Quatuor Diotima, called wie die zarten Blüten im Winter and an ensemble piece, commissioned by the Ensemble C-Barré, from Marseille. The first piece, which title is taken from one of Friedrich Hölderlin's poems, dedicated to his muse Diotima, explored the contrasting attributes contained in the winter flower. This image (which appears at the beginning of Holderlin's poem Diotima) holds at least two meanings (which might be contradictory) that inspired the composition of the piece. On the one hand — as the poet explicitly mentions — the fragility and, on the other, the resistance in loneliness and facing the storm ("und in frostiger Nacht zanken Orkane sich nun"). This piece also makes reference to Luigi Nono's work Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima (1979-1980), from which the French quatuor takes its name. The second piece, for the ensemble C-Barré, was a work in progress and explored the possible relationships between electronics treatments and plucked string instruments, conceiving a common acoustical space. This piece is written for harp, electric guitar, cymbalom, doublebass & electronics.

blue, sable, and burning

At Camargo, Jasmine Hearn developed sound-scapes for her body of work, including a solo titled blue, sable, and burning, which is a dance piece that is currently being shared internationally. This piece listens and responds to memories of home, travel, and water. Returning to imagery from an ongoing collaboration with visual artist Jennifer Meridian, Jasmine intended for this to be a map of where "the sablevenus" has been, and to also be a response to Robin Coste Lewis's poem The Voyage of the Sable Venus. Jasmine also intended to investigate sound and movement for an upcoming premiere of a new work, shook.

Résidus d’histoires

Résidus d’histoires was an acousmatic piece, where the characters are suggested by their absence. These characters are real persons, the dialogues are in-between sociological investigation and personal and "existential" narratives. The piece was based on the accounts of bi-national families from different Mediterranean countries. The expected outcome of the work is a sound installation, an acousmatic and sociologic opera.

Maps and Islands

The goal of the project was to question languages and practices associated with the use of a map and its materiality. The group considered cartography as a field of exploration and of visual, practical, and theoretical propositions.
This question concerned more specifically the cartography of islands. Islands are geographic realities, but also viewpoints from where we can question the state of the world and its spaces. The island can also be understood as a metaphor and a sketch of human thought and perception. The map of an island is an image of how people represent the world and its inhabitants. The cartography of islands, which at first had nautical purposes, could be interpreted as a reproduction of the point of view and of the way of life of island people.
The study focused on a body maps that are both modern and contemporary, scientific and artistic, coming from very different cultural and geographical areas. Research was intrinsically interdisciplinary, crossing different point of views such as history, geography, philosophy, aesthetics, economy, art, etc.

Five on the Black Hand Side (extended research)

Five on the Black Hand Side was a project exploring gestural languages that were born in African American communities during the 1960s and 1970s, including the "the dap" and the black power handshake. Historically, the dap is both a symbol among African American men that expresses unity, strength, defiance, or resistance and a complex language for communicating information. The dap originated during the late 1960s among black G.I.s stationed in bases in the Pacific and throughout Europe during the Vietnam War and was an important symbol of black consciousness, identity, and cultural unity during a time of racial unrest. At Camargo, LaMont looked at the global expansion of the gesture particularly as it moved with hip hop culture. The goal is to connect with past and present hip hop scene in Marseille and Paris to understand the dap’s significance to these cultures and to relay to history of the gesture thus creating a global bridge via the handshake.

ESCP

From Medieval chants to contemporary minimalist electronic music

At Camargo, Erik Truffaz researched Medieval and orthodox chants to get inspiration for a new work for eight voices, trumpet, and electronic music.

He is mainly working on Perotin, a composer of the 12th century, looking for the repetition in his music. While both improvising and composing, Truffaz experienced to see if he could find a link between this Medieval music and contemporary minimalist electronic music.

Erik Truffaz is currently was in residence at Camargo thanks to a partnership with Marseille Jazz des Cinq Continents, a music festival that has long collaborated with Truffaz and that is currently supporting his creative research around voice and choir. The outcome was a series of concerts in outstanding venues, as the Abbey of Saint Victor in Marseille, the Silvacane Abbey, and the Church of Roquevaire.

Messages of Stones

Saying that the Mediterranean has two shores is to portray as a chasm between two worlds: Europe in the North, and the Arab and African Worlds in the South. It should be rather said that the Mediterranean has one shore that simply surrounds it from all sides. Edward Said was of the view that the East is a product of the West's imagination of the other, and they are in that sense two separate worlds. The Mediterranean eliminates this concept, for it is the one space in which we live together, and is the crib of cosmopolitanism invented by the empires of the Mediterranean. During my residency at Camargo, Alaa Abdelhamid explored people's relationship to public spaces in the Mediterranean Basin. In cities like Marseille, Alexandria, or Tangiers, people spend a lot of time socializing outdoors in cafés, parks, or even in the streets. Adults can play dames or pétanque in a public space, they can smoke a cigarette together while having a conversation, hang clothes on their balcony, or simply sit alone on a bench to relax and enjoy the sunset. In Cassis, this relationship to the outdoors can, perhaps, be best symbolized by the pétanque game as well as by the Cassis stone. Indeed, the rules of the pétanque are based on the attempt to get the closest possible to the "cochonnet" and, by doing so, all the boules are gathered around a central piece. In the case of the Cassis stone, it is the opposite movement that one can find: the stone has been part of huge projects that allowed it to travel from Cassis to places as diverse as New York, Alexandria and Port Said. On the other hand, He have sought to deal with Objects in a way that puts them on the same track as Images in the age of the Internet and design programs such as Photoshop and InDesign. The Object, with all its aspects – shape – size – material – color – texture – may change or develop in effect or use subject to changes in one, some or all of the above aspects, as well as the time and location of its existence, whether in a closed or public space. At the end he has produced an object with a piece of the stones of Cassis. This object is reflecting the idea of network that exist in the pétanque game and the stones of Cassis, the relation between people and public spaces and the relation between the different countries along shore of the Mediterranean which can be conceived as separate and connected. He had also worked on digitizing a piece of stone and transfered it to be a book by removing layers from it and scan each layer, until the stone completely disappears, he has printed all the images of the stone layers in a book.

PAINFORTABLE

Through this project, Mohamed Abusal seeked to explore the encounter between hope and relief — both virtual and physical — by manipulating solid elements taken from ruins of houses destroyed during the war and by transforming them into confortable furnitures covered with confortable textures such as sponges, leather. He then decorated them with Crystal and other materials.

Save the Rex

During her residency, Akosua Adoma Owusu worked on the development of her new production called Save the Rex. It is a Ghanaian coming-of-age film that follows feisty Ghanaian-American filmmaker NANA. She is in her late 20s, living in Louisiana when her film is nominated for the African Movie Academy Award. Her pretentious fiancée, a lawyer, refuses to travel with her to Ghana, so she goes alone. While she’s gone, her fiancé decides he doesn’t want a long-distance relationship - not even one that’s only temporarily long-distance, and he ends their relationship. Later that same day, while out exploring a local marketplace, Nana stumbles upon the Rex - an old movie theater. Nana learns from squatters that the cinema house is slated for demolition. Nana decides to try and stop this from occurring as she defies cultural expectations and launches a Kickstarter funding campaign to transform the Rex into a creative space for local artists. As the renovations begin to take shape, the squatters turn on Nana, telling the Ghanaian government that she’s trespassing. Despite her best efforts to get both parties to buy in to her vision, she must put her project on hold - indefinitely. The challenges of renovating the Rex teach her that there’s more to doing business than having a compelling idea and she begins to wonder if the "Academy Award love curse" can actually reach all the way across the Atlantic. 

Turbulence

Part narrative, part documentary reflection on the world and part personal essay, in "Turbulence" Anne Aghion explored trauma and its aftershocks. This first-person narrative mixes together journeys across monsoon battered Northeast India – mostly on foot, but some on water –, super 8 family footage, re-creations and fictionalized episodes from Anne Aghion life and beyond, footage from her earlier films, and animated watercolors. By bringing these different genres together, Aghion hoped to build a narrative that will look at the consequences of human trauma caused by war, conflict and loss, and also trauma to the land and the fragility of our planet. The main character is a woman in her fifties reflecting in voice over on traumas that have shaped her life and work – the death of her mother at a young age, the legacy of her father surviving the Holocaust as a Jew in France are the foundational traumas – drawing parallels between the brain saturation of trauma and the saturation of our poisoned earth. By combining all these genres, the film blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction to create the story of this woman – she's a filmmaker, and the process of making this film becomes an integral part of the story – traversed by historical events and traversing the earth and connecting to the landscape, in search of solace.

Objects of mobility : reflexion, representations, exhibition

This research project was at the intersection between two other projects in progress that also focus on the Mediterrenean area; the former is led by the UMR LPED (IRD/AMU) while the latter was conceived by Malik Nejmi following his residency at IMéRA. Ce que nous disent les objets sur la mobilité des hommes entre les deux rives du Sahara, a research program which associates researchers, curators, and artists as suggested by Sylvie Bredeloup and Sophie Bava, questions Sub-Saharan mobilities with a quirky approach, and aims at exploring the "life" of the objects which accompanied Sub-Saharan migrants as well as nomads during their journeys, both in the geopolitical context of boundaries' solidification, and in that of the "Arab revolutions".

It is Necessary to Defend the Public City

During his residency at the Camargo Foundation, Hacène Belmessous had planned to draft an essay on the future of urban public spaces. All around the world, collective existence is disappearing, replaced by exclusive communities. What constitutes society? Are we still building "public cities" or are we merely creating illusions of such? And, in the end, are these processes destroying the idea of "Us" while undoing collective life?

Things Not Seen

Nicholas Boggs worked his book Things Not Seen, the first book to tell the story of the black American writer James Baldwin’s collaboration with French painter Yoran Cazac. Based on a decade of original research in the United States and Europe, the book promises to deepen and complicate an understanding of Baldwin’s life and work, particularly in his later years, the majority of which he spent at his home in St. Paul-de-Vence in the south of France, where he died in 1987. On either side of the residency, Boggs conducted interviews with contacts, in the St. Paul-de-Vence area, who knew Baldwin.

Encounters with Nothingness: Buddhism in Nineteenth Century French Literature

When Buddhism was first studied in Europe in the nineteenth-century, it was widely considered to be a religion that worshipped the void. But the crucial impact of the idea of nothingness on nineteenth-century French literary history has been almost entirely overlooked. Many French writers – such as Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, Amiel, Laforgue and Segalen – were fascinated by this apparently nihilistic faith, and engaged with Buddhist ideas through French scholarship on the religion, which first emerged in the 1840s and burgeoned in the subsequent decades. The book project Sam Bootle worked on argued for the importance of this engagement. First, it argued that literature stages French culture's reception of Buddhism, representing and performing the fear, fascination, and bemusement with which it was greeted. This aspect of the project provided a new approach to the European encounter with 'the other'. Buddhism's supposed nihilism provoked considerable anxiety in Europe, and literature conveys this anxiety – while also demonstrating the allure of the 'dangerous' idea of nothingness. Many writers were fascinated by a religion which had no God, no central body of doctrine, and no creation myth, and which preached the fundamental emptiness of all reality, including the self. For the post-Romantic generation of writers, many of whom had suffered a loss of faith in 'the Ideal' - whether religious, political, or aesthetic - such ideas were particularly appealing. The book thus also argued that literary interest in Buddhism did not constitute an exoticist retreat from modernity, but a way to think through its aesthetic implications: the problems of defining aesthetic value and the role of the writer in an age of frenetic social, political, and technological change found productive answers in Buddhism's challenging of the very concepts of fixed value and stable selfhood.

Karstic Crossings

Karst: what is it? It's an enigmatic landscape formed from soluble rock such as limestone. The town of Cassis grows out of this charismatic layer of geology characterised by its flat "table-like" surfaces which are porous to water which seeps through the rock, forming sinkholes and subterranean rivers, caves, and tunnels. It's a physically, geologically and metaphorically rich landscape. The myth of Ariadne's thread leading a path through the labyrinth is a Karstic idea."Karstic Crossings" is a research residency and an Art / Science experiment delving deep into the crevices of this thing called Karst. We've found that talking about it can lead you anywhere – to the moon or Mars (as paleogeologist Jacques Collina-Girard showed us). You can enter Karst from different disciplines: geology, anthropology, paleogeology, paleoarchaeology, scuba diving, caving...

The Production of Atmosphere: Architecture, Sensation and Environment in France, 1740-1800

During his time at Camargo, Keith worked toward the completion of his book manuscript, The Production of Atmosphere: Architecture, Sensation and Environment in France, 1740-1800. This project explores the engagement, in late 18th-century France, of architects and theorists with "sensationist" epistemology, which posited sensory experience as the basis for all human knowledge and behavior. As taken up within architecture, this paradigm brought these architects and theorists into conversation with new models of immediate, sensory impression in language, education, sexuality, psychology, politics, and natural science, and served to radically re-orient architecture toward the sensational and emotional impact of form and space on a feeling subject. Understood as a saturated field of affect and mood (or "atmosphere"), architecture in this period turns both toward the inner structures of perception, and outwards to a new conception of "environment", in a development that comes to understand the built environment as an active field of engagement between sensory objects and feeling subjects, and of both with the enveloping atmosphere of air, climate and weather. He used his time at Camargo to substantially revise and re-write the entire manuscript, bringing in particularly the framework of the history of emotions to bear on the project, and to write an entirely new chapter on weather and landscape – this latter possibly owing to the spectacular sea-views just outside his apartment: a fitting influence for a project about the impact of the sensory environment on our emotional and mental states!

I don't want to change your mind, I want to change your music

Lee Breuer's project was the continued revision and preparation for publication of a large body of material. These writings combined the various forms he has been working in – narrative and essay, plays, songs, poems, and autobiography into what he called a holographic structure where the subject is viewed from a series of radically different perspectives such as, song, farce, transmogrified metaphor, and photo-narrative. One of the titles, Pataphysics Penyeach, tells the story. It pays homage to both Jarry and Joyce. At Camargo He rewrote and completed the pivotal section or POV (point of view) of this "Holograph-in-words" titled True Crit which is a Pataphysical history of the Darwinian descent of the critical ethos from genome to John Simon.

The Cultural Memorialisation of the Lebanese Civil War in (Francophone) Texts and Images (2000-2015)

Carla Carlagé project focuses attention on how literature and cinema have become cultural sites for recalling the massive trauma caused by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). In her book, she examined the ways in which Lebanese writers, artists, and filmmakers have revived the collective memory of the (un)civil war that ravaged the country between 1975 and 1990. Their novels, graphic novels and films both defy and critique the politics of forgetting that was actively pursued by the country’s postwar leadership. Carlagé central argument is that the pictures and literary representations of the war that emerge from the cultural sphere between 2000 and 2015 attempt to fill a gaping void in Lebanon’s national historical narrative. My work also examines how such efforts are necessarily limited. They are limited by both the persistent feeling that the war is not (yet) over and by the limits of personal narratives when they are told in the absence of a national project that ensures and facilitates a collective memorialization of the war. The mnemonic effort is thus condemned to circle iteratively, unable to explain the causes of the war or to connect with the memory/memories of the Other whom the war placed in enemy camps. His residency at Camargo allowed her to write a chapter of her book.

Euro-Mediterranean Dreams: Reframing Urban Identity and Belonging in Southern France

In his dissertation, Philip Cartelli analyzed how the effects of physical changes in urban infrastructure interact with cultural programming and rhetoric in a multi-faceted urban redevelopment project in Marseille by examining social interactions, physical construction, and symbolic productions on the J4 Esplanade, a decommissioned pier on the city's waterfront. Through a combination of ethnographic research among users of a delimited urban space, interviews with those in the echelons of institutional power, and participation in cultural events and activities, Cartelli constructed a narrative that reveals emergent technologies of social control that are novel precisely in their use of inclusive rhetoric. Once part of Marseille’s modern-era port, the J4 was bequeathed to the City of Marseille as a barren swath of concrete and stone in the late 1990s and has since been used by working-class and other Marseillais, many of whom hail from other nations, for recreation and socializing. In 2011, the J4 closed to the public for large-scale renovations. A re-designed public space opened in 2013, anchored by two institutions, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, and the Villa Méditerranée, a structure dedicated to cross-cultural dialogues. Beginning in 2010, he has tracked the J4's transformation from a non-purposed common space to one that maintains public access and use, but that in the process has reconceived which publics are welcome, when, and how. Of primary interest in this investigation are the ways in which the implantation of cultural institutions on a former port space creates both physical and symbolic disjuncture with the port city’s past and its hoped-for future. Cartelli's work relies on an informed and critical approach to urban planning, architecture, and infrastructure, as well as a reliance on theoretical and empirical critiques of the processes and products of a growing local culture industry that increasingly use the term "Mediterranean" as their common identifier. At the Camargo Foundation he completed two dissertation chapters, one of which is a historical review of urban development in Marseille, and the second of which traces the genealogy of the J4's new Mediterranean-focused institutions, situating them in parallel timelines of political and economic developments as well as cultural production.

Sappho Comes Out: Lesbians, Media and the Struggle for Gay Rights in Postwar

France shows how French lesbians helped to liberalize French attitudes towards sexual difference in the postwar era. French LGBT rights are currently among the most liberal and best protected in the world. Yet in 1960 the French National Assembly had declared homosexuality a "social plague", in the same category as prostitution, alcoholism, and tuberculosis. Today, with homosexuality illegal in seventy-six countries and homosexuals still subject to persecution worldwide, it is essential to understand how this dramatic transformation occurred in France. Because French law does not recognize minority groups as a protected class of citizens, the French path to LGBT rights contrasts sharply with that taken in countries like the USA, where minority groups have legal status and thus greater political power. Tamara Chaplin's book nevertheless insists that we look at lesbians both because they achieved these ends by using new forms of culture, politics and social media in ways decisively different from gay men, and because wider French support for gay rights surfaced only in the 1990s after the mass media began to reframe "deviant" homosexual desire as more reassuringly maternal and familial. Drawing on texts, images, alternative and mainstream media, as well as extensive filmed interviews, this book offers a rich rendering of a previously undocumented French lesbian past. In so doing, "Sappho Comes Out" provides the first postwar history of an understudied French sexual minority while delivering insights into connections between media, homosexuality, and human rights, writ large. While a fellow at Camargo, Chaplin drafted Chapter One of her book manuscript. Chaplin likewise completed—and submitted—an article based on this research, which will appear in an edited collection on the queer archival turn (tentative entitled, Turning Archival, now forthcoming from Duke University Press). Camargo's superb location also facilitated her visits to the Haut-de-Cagnes, Cannes, Nice, and Toulouse where she conducted archival research and filmed interviews that are vital to the completion of both her book and a documentary project on the history of lesbian life in postwar France.

Tangier Trash and Rif Awbache: Art, Cinema, and the Geography of Moroccan National Identity

Emma Chubb research examined the relationship between visual representation, national identity, minority communities, and postcolonial migration in North Africa and the Middle East. Her dissertation, "Tangier Trash and Rif Awbache: Art, Cinema, and the Geography of Moroccan National Identity", explains the emergence of a generation of artists in Morocco who came of age during the country's violent postcolonial period (1956-1999). It analyzes the representation of Morocco's Amazigh (Berber), Jewish, and emigrant minorities in the photographs, sculptures, videos, and multi-media installations of five artists, arguing for the ways that contemporary art questions how visual representation regulates the political and social recognition of who does and who does not count as Moroccan. While in residence at the Camargo Foundation, Chubb wrote a new dissertation chapter that considers how Ivan Boccara, Badr El Hammami and Fadma Kaddouri, three Moroccan artists now living in France, incorporate personal stories of displacement and family archives (e.g., film reels, cassette tapes, photographs) in videos and installations. She contended that these artists use inherited archives not as a way to travel back in time but in order to move forward into the future, providing insights into postcolonial Moroccan migration and the kinds of labor that make possible the transformation from temporary migration to established diaspora. In addition, while at the Camargo Foundation, Chubb met with artists and art professionals in the region, studied Colloquial Moroccan Arabic in Marseille, conducted research in nearby museums and libraries, and revised the final proofs for two essays on the representation of migration in contemporary art and the history of art education in northern Morocco, both of which will be published in late spring 2016: "Small Boats, Slave Ship: or, Isaac Julien and the Beauty of Implied Catastrophe", (Art Journal, spring 2016) and "The school is dead, long live the school!" (Génération Tétouan, Rabat: Musée Mohammed VI, 2016).

Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970

While in residence Catherine Clark worked on revisions of her book manuscript "Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photography, 1860-1970". The book traces the collection and use of photographs of the French capital in municipal institutions, popular histories, exhibitions, public festivals, the press, and amateur photo contests. It argues that the 1860 founding of the Musée Carnavalet and its library, which later became the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, established a pattern that was repeated throughout the next century: traumatic and disruptive events, from war to urban renovations, inspired Parisians to collect images – and eventually, by default, photographs – as a means of preserving the changing city. Photography was cheap and increasingly efficient and, by the mid twentieth century, it seemed to offer tangible and emotional access to the past as no other medium could. The book's second principal argument is that urban disruption and trauma also changed how Parisians saw old pictures of streets, buildings, and people. Photographs could serve as objective documentation of what they pictured or create an emotional connection to the past. The shifting norms of photographically illustrated books, historical celebrations, exhibitions, and submissions to amateur contests betray these different understandings of what historical evidence photos offered. Rather than telling the history of Paris through photography by looking at photographers or their pictures, Clark's book elucidates how institutions dedicated to city history invested in the medium in order to preserve the city for future investigation and actual uses of photographs to access Paris’s past. The book is thus as much a history of photography as a history of Paris and ultimately suggests that the two are deeply intertwined. When not writing and rewriting the book manuscript, she was also able to research the history of commercial street photographers in Marseille after World War II. 

Andre Bazin's Film Theory; Art, Science and Religion

Angela Dalle Vacche has been working on Andre Bazin's film theory: Art, Science, Religion since 2008. When Dalle Vacche came to Camargo, she had the body of the book, especially the art and science part, in good shape. She improved the religion part and did further research on Bresson. Thus this third section came together. Then, during her 8 weeks at Camargo, she wrote her introduction and conclusion. The introduction most especially was painful, but because of the pressure of her project presentation, she pulled it off, just in time. The conclusion was much easier. The book also contains a chapter on the History of Ideas, before the sequence of Art, Science and Religion. Luckily for her, the husband of one of the Resident Fellows was a physicist and he helped me with some concepts from Einstein that are relevant to cinema.
This was a total coincidence, but it is most helpful to meet everybody including their spouses and partners, because the intellectual level around here was extremely high and diversified. It was a great experience. Dalle Vacche left Camargo looking forward to wrapping up her book with footnotes, bibliography, pictures, and all the rest that it needs. She also started using the Camargo Library for her future project: African Film, African Art. She said that she did not waste one single minute of her time, but also enjoyed meeting everybody and thinks that all these contacts will stay on for a long time.

De Architectura; Music of spaces, in spaces, for spaces

Nathan Davis second string quartet is inspired by the resonances of spaces, from amphora to amphitheaters, and is realized by the musicians through the mutual assistance of modern technology and ancient acoustic practices. The expressive use of acoustic space is an essential element of Davis's music, and he has long been fascinated by the use of Helmholtz resonators to alter room acoustics. In his treatise "De architectura", the Roman architect Vitruvius describes in detail the Greek technique of placing specifically tuned bronze vessels around the audience in amphitheaters to enhance the fundamental and overtones of the voice. A related practice flourished in European churches of the medieval period in which clay pots were installed in the vaults and walls to attenuate the reverberation of certain frequencies. Recent scholarship on medieval and ancient structures in France informed Davis own explorations of their acoustics and his intuitive and exaggerated transference of those characteristics to the amplification and diffusion of the instruments. With research spanning acoustics, archeology, and ancient Greek tuning systems, he has attempted to re-imagine the effect of resonant amphora for an age in which electronic amplification and the projection of a sound away from its source are taken for granted. Davis began with the premise that the instruments and the room are related resonant vessels. The instruments extend this potential beyond the limits of their volume of air by building virtual resonators from a combination of microphones, filters, and monitors. Bowing on the wooden bouts produces white noise that is gradually filtered to reveal pitch material explored later when bowing the strings, much in the way that a seashell focuses ambient noise toward its resonant frequencies.Live electronics also serve as ersatz resonators by filtering frequencies and spectra in discrete channels through an array of small speakers placed among the audience. This expands the capacity of the performers to play the room as an extension of their instruments. These electro-acoustic amphora are flexible in their tuning, and are arranged so as to physically distribute the harmonic structure throughout the sphere of the audience. Over the course of the piece, the sound moves from an acoustically contained and distant space on the stage to envelop the audience, placing them within the instrument. Approximately 18 minutes in duration, the string quartet was commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage for the Calder Quartet, for premiere in October, 2016.

Jimmie Durham at Cirva

Jimmie Durham was invited initially for a working residence at the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques, which included a week at the Camargo Foundation. It was a free invitation without a pre-established project. His intentions have been discussed with the technical team of Cirva and realized during the residence, in association with glassworkers. Jimmie Durham stayed at Cirva on October 2016 and spent one week of his month of residence at the Foundation Camargo in order to find a different tempo in his working rhythm.

Salo (Panorama: I. Fontblanche, II. Mangegarri)

Inspired from Pier Paolo Pasolini's SALO's reflexion on power and domination of man by man through his adaptation of Sade's 120 journées, Aymeric Ebrard worked on one striking element of the set decoration in the movie's ceremony room, the design of which is similar by many ways to masonic temples. Ebrard focused on the monumental carpet where all the action takes place, as a stage in a chess-game like choreography. After having scanned the area and surroundings (Carnoux, Marseille, La Ciotat, Fos, etc...) looking for migration, territory occupancy, architectural issues and local tragedies, Ebrard concentrated his inquiries specifically on Cassis, for both practical and conceptual reasons, as there are here the knot of very strong local issues worthing memory:

• The community of Tunisians workers who came in the 50s from Mareth to work, lived in ex-hotel Panorama - now part of the Camargo residency buildings -, then were moved in a slum in Fontblanche former quarry, where they stayed - and lived separated, torned apart from their families who stayed back home - during 30 years before being relocated into proper appartment buildings constructed in 2006 at very same place. Reaching up to 250 men at one point (90 at the end), they have litterally built the modern Cassis, without having the right to build their own houses.
• The red mud ("Boues Rouges" wastes of used bauxite now imported from Guinea) rejected by alumine plant in Gardanne into the Calanques National Park's Cassidaigne canyon in the Cassis bay from Port-Miou, through a pipeline which is crossing the areas Tunisians were squatting. So thanks to a long chain of contacts, Ebrard managed to locate the places where Alteo (the Alumine plant) was stocking the bauxite wastes and go there to collect some for the painting, to mix with some grayclay Ebrard found and took from Cap Canaille. As well as in the site of the former slum in ex Fontblanche quarry, where Ebrard found different colors of ground. Always for colors of the painting, Aymeric Ebrard collected prickly pears (figues de barbarie), the juice of which has a strong purple color. This cactus grows all over Mediterranea, and would have been originally imported (migration then colonization and proliferation) from Central America (Mexico), where its fruit is figuring the heart of the victimes of human sacrifices in the building of Aztèque capital ...

This in situ installation is created specifically to Camargo's Greek amphitheater, the round stage and rectangular pool wooden floor disposal being exactly similar of the original display of Dorn's carpet in Claridge Hotel halls.

The Project

As part of Marseille Provence 2013, Erik and Boris took part to the program Quartiers Créatifs with Stefan Shankland. During two years, they have carried out, with the Hauts de Mazargues inhabitants, artistic inquiries, explorations of the district, encounters and exchanges. The PARC project had ended in the conception, test, and presentation of different suggestions for the past, present and future of this mutating part of Marseille.

The time span of this project (2012-2013) coincided with the creation of the Parc National des Calanques. In this context, new questions have emerged: to what extent has the conception of land/hinterland characterized the citizens' relation to this landscape to this day ? Is the Parc National an animated concept ? Who perceives this landscape as a park , who doesn't ? How is the transition process going between the park and the city ?

During their residency at Camargo, the two artists continued this reflection in another area at the outskirts of the park, and explored the potentials of these locations as well as their social and cultural dimensions. Through the use of maps, sketches, pictures and urban anthropology, they proposed a new geography of the area, in-between artistic production and research.

Cinematic Crossroads: Situating Film History in Mediterranean Marseille

"Cinematic Crossroads: Situating Film History in Mediterranean Marseille" is a book project focusing on how France's moments of encounter and exchange. It draws on films from the 1890s to the 2010s, most of which are hardly known in the Anglophone context, focusing on how they intervene in—and reimagine—particular social spaces. In doing so Cinematic Crossroads complicates accounts of French national cinema, provides a mid-level theorization of the relationship between urbanism and cinema, and produces a new kind of transnational film history that "provincializes" major metropolitan and film production centers. most famous port city has enabled forms of filmmaking that productively imagine 

X-Ray Life

The first two parts of Rula Halawani project are about the checkpoint and the X-ray machines that are used to scan travelers. To do these parts, Halawani used X-rayed destroyed films. Conceptually, this explores the effect of X-ray machines on people who cross Israeli checkpoints every day. Can a camera, a roll of film, or a series of photographs physically depict a narrative of corporeal harm inscribed inside our bodies? Can they capture the effect of the X-ray machines on humans, like the films? When Halawani first went to photograph the checkpoint, he saw life there. Suddenly, as he witnessed people lining up in heavy metal cages, soldiers screaming at them, and children crying, the checkpoint began to epitomize the way that the Palestinian people are locked in small places with no freedom of movement under the occupation. These checkpoints became small, occupied territories, images of Palestine’s cities, territories that the military locks up. They are representative of the cities they lock down. Palestinian society is confined and trapped between the checkpoints and the Apartheid wall. Halawani used the checkpoints to symbolize the lock down that has been imposed upon a large percentage of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. Regarding the third part, it is going to include the Palestinian history from 1900-1946, before the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the photos show how Palestinians lived in Palestine before the occupation. It will show their daily life in their villages and cities. This third part was done and developed completely during Camargo residency and part of the project is done at MuCEM in Marseille.

Lost in Translations: Language & Colonial Rule in Nineteenth-Century French Algeria, 1830-89

Allison Korinek dissertation examined French administrative interpreters during the first decades of imperial expansion into Algeria (1830-1889). Communication with the local population was a necessary precursor for colonization, and France's continual dependence on an undependable interpreter corps reveals the difficulty of imposing colonial rule. Korinek study calls into question a scholarly assumption of mutual understanding between the colonizer and the colonized. She used interpreter personnel files, official correspondence, and administrative paperwork to bring to life the messy bureaucratic procedures that gave life to the everyday empire. Fore grounding the human dimension of imperial rule, this social history of the interprétariat in French Algeria illuminates the formation of a new professional class of translators through the mundane administrative practices of colonial governance. As a fellow at the Camargo Foundation Korinek conducted archival research at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and the Marseille Chamber of Commerce. She focused on collecting documents from the very beginning of colonization with the goal of tracking administrative changes as long time French bureaucrats struggled to adapt to the exigencies of daily life in the empire. Korinek followed the careers bilingual functionaries as they left established careers all across the Mediterranean to take part in the conquest of Algiers; she traced the anxieties of imperial officials as the traditional bureaucratic practices of France continually fell short of the needs of a multilingual populace. Her dissertation project illuminates the scramble to reformulate old French models of governance to accommodate its new Algerian territory and asks how the halting embrace of poly lingual practices inflected French rule. By recovering the lives and labors of these intermediaries, Korinek shift the locus of imperial power toward largely unacknowledged men—indeed, the mark of a good translator was to become invisible—who played a key role in projecting French power abroad.

Shadows of Gandhi

Editing/Research/Sound design scripting of a feature length documentary entitled "Shadows of Gandhi". Five years of filming on socio-cultural-political paradoxes of contemporary India. This film transmits social satire of colonial and post globalised India. On a quite different plane film juxtapose number of political consequences like Transparency in democracy, Crisis of Development process, ecological catastrophe in contemporary India with the shadows of universal peace idol "Gandhi". Filmed footage implies behind, how the dawn of Neo capitalism obscured the uprising of alternative people struggle movements in India. Likewise the Crew initiated this film to mount their experimental persistence on film making, However it is confessing through exploring the medium "cinema". Thus the narrative approach itself acknowledges disintegration of the sufferings between documentary and fiction. Featured Madhav Gadgil, Narayan deshai, Medha Patkar- K sahadevan, Anand Patwardhan, VS Govindan Kutty, P sainath included with series of reenactment sequence too. Glimpses of Audio-Visual documentation From 2011 to 2015 like stand struggle on Land by Tribes in Kerala, Koodankulam anti nuclear protest, Plachimada Anti-cocacola protest, Anti- endosulphan protest ,Narmada movement against Dam and Farmer suicide respectively.  Narrative does holding forth on Ambedkar- Gandhi ideological conflict, creative pathos of Indian-Marxism and the persona of MK Gandhi. It is a matter of allegorical negation of existing rough cut of the film for a better alternative visual product in the course of re-understanding of montage and unifying sound design. By what is an attempt to build rhythmic inconsistency between political anarchism and cinematic madness, but the equilibrium is still far away for that further treatment repair indeed.  Without going to abstractive visual expression, the research unfolds a political memoir of present India especially the statistics. All the scholastic subtleties have neither gone under a conundrum when it comes like the Do the film needs to be detailed version or Avant-garde. Before encountering film senses quantum of questions like How does the system conspire against its own commune's argumentative urge? To what degree the neo liberal Market de politicize people's conscience? In fact, This Video essay project is confirmed to conceive for introspection with Humanities and social science researchers.     

Zeuf+20

During her residency at the Camargo Foundation, Charlotte Lagarde has been "scanning the landscape", filming the water in the early morning from her paddle board in the Calanques, dramatic storms, life in the harbor and night fishing. Lagarde reviewed and re-shot some of the footage of Zeuf and watched the 16mm and 8mm films respectively shot by her grand father and father during their summers sailing on the Mediterranean Sea in the 1970's. As a child, Lagarde's mother read her The Odyssey on the boat. At Camargo, Charlotte Lagarde re-read The Odyssey and read French contemporary takes on this Mediterranean mythology; La Lune dans les puits by François Beaune and Ulysse ou les Constellations, a beautiful photographic diary that retraces Ulysse's travels today. In it, the author Franck Pourcel captures her relationship to the Mediterranean perfectly: "The Mediterranean, a territory in which I have developed my imagination and grounded my mythology". At Camargo, revisiting her childhood on this sea, Lagarde started writing in French (her native tongue) for the first time in her work, opening up the possibility of a bilingual film. With this film, Lagarde wanted to create a composite of fragments of experience that resemble the fabric of memory. For structural models, she looked to a new movement in non-fiction literature, where poets are incorporating the personal, the political, the emotional, philosophical and theoretical. At Camargo, she read Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Solmaz Sharif, Ari Banias and Brian Blanchfield. Inspired by the form of their books, she edited new sequences, which she presented at the end of her stay to her Camargo colleagues. Their response and feedback was essential and has encouraged Lagarde to move forward in that direction with confidence. Also presenting her earlier films helped her see her work as a whole in a new light through their eyes.

Carrières de Lumières

The project outline for Roseanne Lynch fellowship at the Camargo Foundation was to explore the grand voids that are the limestone quarries in Baux de Provence. Exploring the conversation between photography and architecture, Lynch was interested in how the camera is used to negotiate an exchange between realities; reality as we see it with our eyes and how the camera transforms and represents the experiential reality through its mechanics and optics. Lynch was concerned with the object that is the photograph, and question it's value as a representation  of a phenomenological engagement with the site. During her time here, her exploration expanded to include Eileen Grey's house E-1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Villa Noailles at Hyères and Le Corbusier's Unité de Habitation in Marseille.

La Mérule

The Mérule is a chamber opera conceived by Sylvie Robert (soprano and librettist) and Michelle Agnes Magalhaes (composer). This project was born of the common desire to create a new lyric form. It simultaneously incorporates the poetic aspects of our life human beings and new forms of technology we have. The juxtaposition of ideologies, social strata and historical periods is the basis for La Mérule. Each character expresses his individual perception of reality by a musical language in particular. In this situation, the real dialogue does not exist; the only interaction between the characters is done by juxtaposition of musical strata and forced events. The instrumentation consists of basson, trumpet, accordeon, guitar, percussion, double bass, electronics, and two singers (soprano and mezzo-soprano). La Merule proposes a voyage inside the musical language. It means that each character has his "voice" and a particular way of articulating words and music. The instrumental ensemble unifies and integrates the diversity that exists on the vocal part. The Mérule lasts about 50 minutes and is divided into nine scenes that mix dark humor, supernatural situations and allusions to the world of romantic and modern life. Since La Mérule is a long term project, during the residence at Camargo Foundation Michelle Agnes Magalhaes developed some particular elements of the opera: the drama's general structure, instrumental disposal, and some musical structures and sketches consisting on the relation between instruments and voices. Michelle Agnes Magalhaes also composed opera's second scene (for accordion, guitar and double bass), and the fifth scene (for basson, accordeon, double bass, trumpet and percussion).

Rationalizing Rape in the French Enlightment

Mary McAlpin came to the Camargo Foundation to work on a book-length study in which she examined how, in the ferment of the Enlightenment secularization of sexuality and the promotion of the sex drive as natural and good, heterosexual rape came to be theorized not merely as a non-crime, but even as a non-event, in the avant-garde medical and philosophical works of the period. McAlpin was also interested in how this elision of heterosexual violence both reflected and was integrated into artistic works, especially novels and paintings. McAlpin claim was that sometime in the eighteenth century, rape as we know it was invented, based on Thomas Laqueur's famous statement about the "invention” of sex. This echo was appropriate in that she approached the complex question of the Enlightenment discourse on rape in the context of recent, updated studies of what Laqueur christened the "two-sex model". The usual caveats surrounding radical breaks in the history of ideas applied to her project. Many of the clichés surrounding rape, not to mention the actual experience of the rape victim, remained the same, although a clouding of notions of guilt and consent constitutes one of the more pernicious and long-lasting elements of the shift McAlpin was analyzing. As she argued in her conclusion, our current cultural misconceptions around the act of (especially) heterosexual rape cannot be adequately understood outside of the heated debates concerning the gendered, autonomous, secular self that took place during the Enlightenment. At a time when an attack on the concept of sin, combined with the celebration of individual autonomy, was the sinequa non of philosophical daring, those viewed as Other all too often fell victim to the exigencies of newly developing systems of thought.

A Society Through the Hourglass; Testators in Marseille Before the Black Death

The project for which Francine Michaud received a fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis aims to produce a critical edition of Marseille’s testaments from 1248 to 1350, the oldest and largest corpus of medieval wills in the French territory. In total, Marseille’s archives have yielded more than 580 documents. In late medieval society, will-making became, indeed, a popular practice. Often made upon impending death, testaments were not only a means of patrimonial transmission, but also, and perhaps foremost in the medieval culture, vehicles to secure one’s passage in the afterlife. Apart from their antiquity, Massilian wills allow for the study of a wide - and largely illiterate - spectrum of the population who otherwise would be left voiceless. Furthermore, Marseille offers another originality worth investigating: the overrepresentation of women (52% of all extant manuscripts). The times were propitious for women, especially those actively involved in the militant Church (notably the members of the local beguinage), to use the testament as a narrative to express (and exhort others to abide by) a mode of piety receptive to the latest theological developments at the turn of the fourteenth century: the Thomist notion of beatitude propagated by Franciscan confessors. Thanks to their close relationships to the Franciscans, Massilian women were then in a privileged position to "proselytize" this novel spirituality by using the best perennial tool at their disposal, if not the only one for the majority of them: the testament.

Rethinking l'Indigénat in New Caledonia (1887-1946)

Adrian Muckle came to Camargo to work on a history of the indigénat régime in New Caledonia in collaboration with Isabelle Merle, CNRS-CREDO, Marseille. The indigénat was the apparatus created by France to govern the peoples classified as "natives" in colonies as diverse as Algeria, West Africa, Indochina and New Caledonia. The term l’indigénat refers both to the administrative regulations that the régime enforced and to the legal condition/status of the "native". Drawing on research conducted in the Archives of New Caledonia (Nouméa) and the Centre des Archives d’Outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence), the project examines both the origins of the régime in Algeria, the process of its translation into colonial practice and indigenous experience in New Caledonia and its legacy. While at the Camargo foundation Muckle focussed on developing the chapters that will make up Part Two of the book—"The indigénat at work: sociology of a colonial world"—and which collectively examine the operation of a microphysics of power in a variety of domains including labour relations, clothing, the collection of taxes, the treatment of leprosy, the regulation of mobility and the relations formed between Kanak chiefs and the colonial gendarmerie. A particular challenge and concern has been to move beyond the official texts and regulations that gave administrative and legal shape to the régime and to focus on the "practices"; how it functioned on the ground and in the lives of Kanak and colonial officials.One way in which the chapters that Muckle have been working on contribute to a "rethinking" of l’indigénat is by developing a more nuanced understanding of the different historical moments that shaped it in New Caledonia. Whereas l’indigénat is often thought of in the form that it had taken by the time of the Second World War, this study pays attention to the earlier shifts and transformations. One such shift occurred in 1897-1902 in conjunction with the intensification of European settlement and rising concern about the need to regulate contact between Kanak, free and penal settlers and immigrant indentured labourers. Another such shift would occur in the mid-1920s with the realisation that Kanak labour was a resource of as yet unrealised potential that the colony could mobilise en masse.

Beyond the Boundaries of Live Electronics in Music and Performance

Development of mobile, adaptable electronic devices intended to facilitate the use of unconventional live-electronics by composers of new music. These tools were used in the conception of a new composition for instrumental ensemble, in which the musicians' gestures are transformed to sound, without the use of acoustic musical instruments. The electronic tools developed include small, versatile, wireless motion and pressure sensors. These sensors track movement, touch or sound levels, and the incoming data is employed to create, modify or transform sound. Thus, composers may use the tools in order to break the usual causal relationship that exists between a performer, her gesture and the sound produced, in order to create new and original performance situations. Since the tools are mobile and adaptable, they allow for repeat performances of new compositions in a variety of locations. This is an unusual privilege when working with intricate live-electronics as most venues or performing ensembles do not have access to the necessary equipment. The development of these tools is intended to grant composers greater freedom when conceiving of works with live-electronics so that they are not limited to the simplest of materials and set-ups commonly available.The composition conceived using these tools is for five musicians, each equipped with one or more sensors. The sensors are adapted to the players' gestures: those sensors assigned to string players react to bow pressure or the movement of bowing/plucking gestures, those assigned to wind players react to air pressure and those assigned to percussion instruments react to sound level and attack transients. Throughout much of the composition, the performers do not play their own instruments but rather their bodies or parts of their instruments. Thus the violist uses his bow but applies it to his arm rather than to a violin, and the clarinetist only plays one component of his instrument that cannot produce sound independently. The gestures made by the performers while playing create electronic sounds which are then transmitted through loudspeakers and resonating metal objects dispersed throughout the room and the audience. As a result, a visual-auditive discrepancy is produced between the performers "playing" on stage yet clearly unable to generate sound themselves, and the sounds emitted by the loudspeakers and objects, which are clearly byproducts of the performers' actions yet take place in a different space.

Archeology of a French right-wing ethos. Between history and choreography

The team surrounding Sandra Iché, artist choreographer, and Candice Raymond, historian, undertakes with Droite/Gauche an archeology of our political orientations. In which histories are they rooted ? How do we inherit political orientations ? Which "being in the world" do they construct ? Droite/Gauche is not only the exhibition of a research, but also its choreographical and theatrical play. This project intertwines the working techniques of a multiplicity of collaborators. Philosophers, dansers, historians, actors and sociologists altogether question the positioning mecanisms on the political chessboard and in the context of our power relations

Fragile Abstractions

One of the aspects of this research is to experiment the "moving" abstraction process which generates temporary, fragile objects linked to the invention of the sound and visual device. Kandisky said: "I call abstract art any art which does not contain any recall, any evocation of the observed reality, this reality being or not the starting point of the artist." Conversely, Antonella Bussanich and Carole Rieussec wish to make this reality trail visible, as a transparent layer of the objects created, to make the hands which shoot and play music become perceivable by the spectator. The two artists get their inspiration from feminist research in anthropology, philosophy or musicology in order to generate new approaches to abstract art. In their performance, Carole and Antonella create bridges between concrete and abstract, figurative and pure forms, tonal and noisy music, concrete and electronic music...

Coin Coin

Matana Roberts's plan for this residency was to work on an ongoing project she has been developing since 2006 called Coin Coin. It is a 12-part mixed media series, of sounds, music, images, and collages. Her goal for the Camargo Foundation residency was to flesh out the music/sound and visual art framework for Chapter 4 of the series, which focuses on history, ancestry, witness and memory. The term "Coin Coin" is pronounced koin-koin, not to be confused with the French pronunciation or meaning. The title is related to the American name of a woman in Matana Roberts' ancestral line. Though they are not part of a book, she signifies this work in "chapters" because they are very narrative-driven. In 2016, she had completed 3 of the 12 projected chapters that each deal with a segment of American history that fascinates, disgusts, inspires and in the end propels her to work harder on developing a mixed media creative language that leaves art legacy and builds "bridges".

If Only the Sea

If Only the Sea is a visceral diary film that explores the ephemerality of experience and memory using a fragmented and disjunctive narrative structure. The film thrusts back and forth in time and place, revealing waves and shards of sonic and visual glimpses of life that echo span 20 years of the filmmakers personal archive of super 8 and 16mm rushes and sound recordings and phone messages. The paradox of these echoing moments, tangled in time, constructs a narrative space of remembering and forgetting and a sensory voyage for the spectator to fuse their own experiences and memories with that of the films..

Apprenticeship of a Criminal

Disordering the Establishment: Art, Display and Participation in France, 1958-1981

Lily Woodruff research investigated art practices in France during the 1960s and '70s that were based on institutional critique, public participation, and social engagement. Advanced artistic practices in the years surrounding the landmark events of May 1968 actively participated in shifting the perspective of the public as they engaged critiques of technocracy and Establishment ideology, appeals to direct political engagement, and a concern with the ways that the social sciences and structuralism were modelling society. During my time at the Camargo Foundation, Lily Woodruff have focused on developing two chapters of her book project tentatively titled "Disordering the Establishment: Art, Display, and Participation in France, 1958-1981".The first chapter focuses on the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, which made geometric abstractions, Op art, and kinetic art. The second chapter that Woodruff worked on concerns the institutional critique of Daniel Buren. Buren is best known for the minimalist striped posters and canvases made from awning material that he installed both in museums and across public spaces in order to call attention to the way that power of arts institutions are anchored in institutional spaces. These custom-designed, in situ installations highlighted the formal, functional, and social contingencies of spaces thereby making visible what is typically taken for granted and therefore unrecognized. By exhibiting beyond the bounds of art galleries, he asserted his own artistic authority in opposition to that of institutions. Lily Woodruff focus on the way that Buren situated the public in relation to arts institutions through strategies that included variously display of his work in public spaces, the articulation of permanent vs. temporary architectural structures, sociological analyses of the relationship of arts institutions to the general public, and the radical rejection of art as conservative and anti-participatory.Beyond these two chapters, the book also includes chapters on Andre Cadere and the Collectif d'Art Sociologique.