Born in the United States, Jimmie Durham (1940-2021) turns in the 1960s to theater, performance, literature and makes a commitment in the Movement of Civil Rights. He will be very active defender of Indians’ rights from 1973 till 1980 (as Executive director of the International board of the Indians for which he is spokesperson at the United Nations). From 1980s, he decides to dedicate himself completely to art. The works of these years are developed in an American context where he pursues any forms of racism and highlights questions concerning identity and ethnicity. From 1981 till 1983, he is the Director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists of New York. He settles down in Mexico in 1987 and then in Europe in 1994. The European working context leads him to change the orientation of his work. The exhibition "Architexture" at the Micheline Szwajcer’s gallery in Antwerp, testifies of this change of direction. He bases his investigations on the language and the architecture as structures, which are places of exercise of power. These "Eurasian" decoding, as he says, assert as the passage from politics to poetics, including the geography: a drift on an excessively big continent, impossible to hold, where he wish to get lost, to lose his marks to observe better.

(Extract from the chronology of the catalog of the exhibition "Rejected Stones", Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris/ ARC, 2009).

Jimmie Durham was invited for a working residence at the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques. It was a free invitation without a pre-established project. The intentions were 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 remained one week of his month of residence at the Foundation Camargo to find a different tempo in his working rhythm.

Jimmie Durham was in residence from October 14 to 18, in partnership with CIRVA.