EHESS x Camargo

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.

  • About the partner +

    The École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), French Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities, brings together scholars and students from all over the world with the aim at bringing together all disciplines of social sciences and humanities to understand societies in all their complexity. Since its creation as autonomous institution in 1975, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, social sciences, philosophy, geography, literary studies, psychology and cognitive sciences are practised at EHESS in a permanent interdisciplinary dialogue. The institution hosts 40 research units organized around a field, an approach or, for the purpose of a third of them, a "cultural area". More than 800 teachers and scholars develop knowledge, train and supervise master's and PhD students and scholars. EHESS has a very important centre in Marseille.

    Learn more: www.ehess.fr

  • Eligibility +
    • The researcher must belong to a laboratory under the tutelage of the EHESS. In order to be eligible, the researcher must be affiliated to EHESS at the time of application and during the residency. 

    • The artist must be the principal creator of a new work or project. To be eligible, the artist must reside outside of France.

    • This program encourages applications by pairs that are already formed;

    • The jury will be particularly attentive to teams working in connection with the EHESS activities in Marseille (mainly the Allez Savoir Festival);

    • Particular attention will also be given to projects that resonate with the thematic axes that Camargo is currently developing around the future of our societies. Because of its geographical location at the heart of the calanques and facing the Mediterranean, but also because of its history of experimentation at the crossroads of disciplines, Camargo is today a place for sharing questions and knowledge, experimenting with new forms of encounters and thinking about possible futures. Candidates are free to interpret these axes in a very open way, the starting point being the horizon that opens up before one's eyes and invites the imagination to wander;

    • Priority may also be given to projects for which a cultural institution is approached for the production and/or distribution.

    • The first results of this collaboration should be presented at EHESS and Camargo during the residency. The collaboration may continue within other residency programs (e.g. the CRESS program at EHESS).
    • Projects selected in the framework of the EHESS CRESS program are eligible. 
  • Stipend +

    Each of the two residency grants will include: 

    •  For the artist: an allowance equivalent to one month of the visiting professors program (between 3,700 and 4,000 euros depending on the country of origin for a period of 28 days);

    •  For the EHESS researcher: only the reimbursement of expenses related to the residency (transportation if necessary, per diem).

    The hosting of the selected team at Camargo includes the provision of an apartment with a fully equipped kitchen and bathroom during the month of residence. Because of its location facing the sea and its relationship to the surrounding landscape, Camargo offers a setting conducive to research, contemplation and reflection. Work spaces include a library, an art and music studio (subject to availability), an outdoor theater, and informal shared spaces such as terraces and gardens.

  • Calendar

2023 Projects

Ka TOTO, to freestyle the map: Wanny S-King and Morgane Dujmovic

"Ka TOTO, to freestyle the map" was born from the encounter between artist Wanny S-King and researcher Morgane Dujmovic. Together, they question the experience of childhood in exile. Observing the dehumanization of young African people by utilitarian policies, they will manipulate computer waste, recycled and transformed into an emblematic character of this lost childhood: Ka TOTO. To animate this character along his trajectory, they will explore the intersection between Afro dance, musical improvisation and sensitive cartography. Ka TOTO is place of its own, a space generated among themselves and with the audience to recreate the movement that constantly animates migratory plans, to project the map out of the two-dimensional plane: to freestyle it.

 

Wanny S-King

 

Originally from the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Wanny S-King lives between Congo and Italy. Wanny began his musical career in 2005. His songs "Wale Wale" and "Son excellence", which criticize Congo's democratic illusion and political clientelism, are heard throughout the Great Lakes region. After this first success with his Congolese public, Wanny was obliged to leave the country for a few weeks. He also produced the song "Liberté", in support of human rights activists imprisoned for no reason in the DRC, and in particular those from LUCHA. he initiated the "Shusha Ma Flow" project ("Bring out the flow" in Swahili), with children living on the streets of Goma, offering them a space to express their talents through hip-hop sessions.

 

Morgane Dujmovic

 

Morgane Dujmovic is a Geographer and Political Scientist at CNRS (PACTE, Grenoble & TELEMME, Aix-Marseille). She previously carried out a post-doctorate at EHESS (LAP, Paris). Her work on borders and migration combines cartographic and artistic practice such as music freestyle and circus acrobatic lifts. She leads the project ‘La CartoMobile’ which interrogates the concrete conditions of participatory research with exiles. Her experimental work questions what movement brings to scientific method on sensitive fieldworks: French borders, the Balkan and the Central Mediterranean. She is also a member of Institut Convergences Migration and various associations in the field of migrations, notably Migreurop and Anafé.


Recuperation : Clara Lecadet, Dread Scott and Jenny Polak

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.

 

Watch their interview online


Le Feu de la Baleine: Fabien Clouette and Jérémie Brugidou

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.