The École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Camargo Foundation are joining forces to offer two residency grants to the Camargo Foundation for an artist (must reside abroad) and a social science researcher. This system aims to stimulate relations and exchanges between researchers and artists for the development of projects at the interface between the social sciences and all areas of the arts with a view to joint production.

Recuperation’ will create a public performance art intervention and museum presentation using the architectural legacy of the slave trade in Marseilles as context and backdrop. The project will engage broad audiences in the issues raised by contemporary post-colonial migration policies, and their historic roots, connecting them in a new narrative.
Specific sites connected with the slave trade, animated with large-scale banners and projections, will provide a platform for three public meetings, creating a real-time dialogue and connecting colonial history with today’s struggles of the sans-papiers movement and of deportees’ associations in Africa.

The EHESS/Camargo residency will provide them with intensive time together to plan and make all necessary connections with interested institutions and activist migrant leaders in Marseille and in Africa. When the public performances are actualized, they will film and draw the events and then present the recordings, banners and large-scale drawings at a Marseille art venue during the 2024 Allez-Savoir festival.

Dread Scott and Jenny Polak are artists who are individually known for politically charged and socially engaged work that links issues of oppression and resistance in history with the present. They have collaborated on several projects, including ‘The Great Unconformity’, created through a residency at the Grand Canyon National Park, and most recently ‘Passes’ - a series of experimental lithographs and pigment prints which explore intersections between the legacy of the French slave trade and present day migration from Africa into Europe.


Dread Scott

Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this.
His art has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, The Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, and street corners across the country. Hi work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is a 2023 Rome Prize Fellow and has also received fellowships form John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant. In 2019, he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a public performance, which was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times and CNN. His art is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the National Gallery of Art.


Jenny Polak
Jenny Polak uses familiar materials to make public and community engaged art, drawings, structures and commemorative objects. Her studies in architecture, family history of migration, and collaborations with directly impacted community members drive projects about prison abolition and community empowerment in the face of hostile authorities. With ink, building materials, upcycled fabrics and ceramics Polak’s work connects buoyant struggles for justice to domestic dreams. Her projects celebrate and provoke resistance - to expanding prisons and border violence and to the fear-mongering fueling them. Her art activates sites where it is seen and lifts up the vision of participants.
Polak has degrees in Architecture and Art. She was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program and has exhibited across the US and UK. Her work has won support from Creatives Rebuild NY, Socrates Sculpture Park, NYFA, the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of Visual Art and Franklin Furnace, and residencies including the Camargo Foundation, Northwestern University, Newark Museum, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Le Feu de la Baleine is a documentary film exploring the links between our coastal societies and large cetaceans. The choice to anchor this Art/Science site in the Basque Country is due to the local heritage as much as to its contemporary activities: once a hunting ground, the Basque coast is now home to several naturalist organizations forging privileged relationships with local colonies of cetaceans. We decided to call the film, The Fire of the Whale. Since the time of its intensive hunting, the whale has been a carrier of fire: its oil provided lighting and was a fundamental resource for the nascent industrialization. Today this fire has become above all symbolic and emotional: protected animal, “charismatic”, its presence as much as its absence moves and unites. From these masterful bodies seen or heard at sea to the dramatic corpses found stranded, passing through the reconstructed bodies exhibited in museums, we explore in this film the common history that we share with these animals with such a special status in our physical, imaginary and social worlds. We seek informal, scientific and cumulative knowledge to grasp this complex relationship between exploitation and fascination. At Villa Camargo, we will mainly work on the sound mixing of the film, in conjunction with bio-acousticians.