Events

Saturday 24th of February, from 3pm to 6pm

LATEX, UNICORN, LANGUAGES: FOR A DISHONEST RESEARCH
Conversation with Mercedes Azpilicueta, Elisabeth Lebovici (to be con­firmed), Inga Lāce and Virginie Bobin

Mercedes Azpilicueta, Untitled, 2018. Courtesy: Mercedes Azpilicueta

Argentinean artist Mercedes Azpilicueta pre­sents her­self as a "dis­honest" researcher. During her res­i­dency at Villa Vassilieff as part of the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, she began writing a script for an upcoming per­for­mance, where she inter­laces the work of the Franco-Argentinian artist Lea Lublin, the series of enig­matic tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn, the lit­erary aes­thetics of the Neobarroso Rioplatens, Chilean reg­gaeton, imag­i­nary char­ac­ters and vagrants of the under­world, as well as the the­o­reti­cians Suely Rolnik and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Mercedes Azpilicueta’s sce­nario was fueled by working ses­sions with the chore­og­ra­pher Pauline Simon, Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias (per­­former and per­­for­­mance maker, and a prac­ti­tioner of per­cep­tive somatic-psy­choe­d­u­ca­tion), the actress Emmanuelle Lafon, the
the­o­reti­cians Suely Rolnik and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Mercedes Azpilicueta’s sce­nario was fueled by working ses­sions with the chore­og­ra­pher Pauline Simon, Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias (per­­former and per­­for­­mance maker, and a prac­ti­tioner of per­cep­tive somatic-psy­choe­d­u­ca­tion), the actress Emmanuelle Lafon, the artist and designer Lucile Sauzet, the film­maker Hélène Harder as well as public work­shops. It tes­ti­fies to a research pro­cess that joy­fully jumps genres, dis­ci­plines and eras, is embodied in mul­tiple voices and lan­guages, solicits the senses as much as the thought and wel­comes the joy of a col­lec­tive con­struc­tion, wobbly and vol­un­tarily cor­rupted.

The dis­cus­sion will take place in the spaces of the exhi­bi­tion Akademia : Performing Life, on view until the 24th of March at the Villa Vassilieff, in which Mercedes Azpilicueta pre­sents Pink pop­ping plank (2018), an art­work that is both sculp­ture, set, script and score to be acti­vated.
Conceived by cura­tors Solvita Krese, Inga Lāce (Latvian Center for Contemporary Art) and Camille Chenais (Villa Vassilieff), the exhi­bi­tion Akademia: Performing Life itself com­poses a poly­phonic nar­ra­tive around the artistic com­mu­nity founded by Raymond Duncan, focusing on a lesser known figure, that of the Latvian dancer and writer Aia Bertrand. Like the weaves cre­ated by its self-taught mem­bers, the exhi­bi­tion inter­twines the threads of myth, cura­to­rial and artistic research, and the sub­jec­tive inter­pre­ta­tion of the sto­ries pro­duced by and around the Akademia.

In the pres­ence of film­maker Hélène Harder, and with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Raymond Duncan san­dals, latex tumors, a uni­corn and a few poems.

Languages: English, French, Spanish, Latvian ...

Mercedes Azpilicueta is a visual and per­­for­­mance artist from Argentina based in The Netherlands. Drawing on a tran­s­dis­­­ci­­plinary approach within her artistic prac­tice, she develops pro­­jects that explore the affec­­tive qual­i­ties of lan­guage and voice, the polit­ical dimen­­sion of female desire, and the con­nec­­tions between embod­i­­ment, glo­­cal­i­ties and resis­­tance. Her work opts for per­­sonal and par­tic­ular method­­olo­gies such as mnemonic and lit­erary tech­niques, public sound­s­capes in rela­­tion to social and cul­­tural con­di­­tions and the use of per­­for­­ma­­tive ele­­ments for pro­­ducing knowl­­edge, allowing pro­cesses where con­t­in­­gency, asso­­ci­a­­tion and play­­ful­­ness take place.

Élisabeth Lebovici is a his­­to­rian, art critic, activist and writer. She has been a jour­­nalist at Libération, writing in its cul­­tural column from 1991 to 2006. She wrote Femmes Artistes/Artistes Femmes (Hazan, 2007) in col­lab­o­ra­­tion with Catherine Gonnard and runs the blog le beau vice.
In 2017, she pub­­lished Ce que le sida m’a fait (What AIDS has done to me, Paris, Les presses du réel), an inti­­mate and polit­ical account of inter­sec­­tions between art and activism, seen through the AIDS epi­­demic in the 1980s and 1990s in France and the United States.

Inga Lāce is a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) and a cura­to­rial fellow at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2015-2016), where her exam­i­na­tion of the inter­twined rela­tion­ships between nature and cul­ture, and (art) insti­tu­tions and ecology has led to the pro­duc­tion of a sym­po­sium and a pub­li­ca­tion (forth­coming in 2017). She has recently curated the exhi­bi­tions Resilience. Secret Life of Plants, Animals and Other Species at Бükü (the Büro für kul­turelle Übersetzungen) in Leipzig (2016), and Lost in the Archive, with Andra Silapetere, in Riga (2016), which took the LCCA’s archive of con­tem­po­rary art as its starting point. She also curated the exhi­bi­tion (Re)con­struc­tion of Friendship (2014), which was held in the former KGB house in Riga. Lāce co-edited the book Revisiting Footnotes. Footprints of the Recent Past in the Post-Socialist Region with Ieva Astahovska (2015), and she was a curator,with Solvita Krese of the 7th and 8th edi­tions of the con­tem­po­rary art fes­tival Survival Kit (2015- 2016).

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EXHIBITION



Akademia : Performing Life
At Villa Vassilieff


January 13 - March 24, 2018
With (-)auteur, Mercedes Azpilicueta (Pernod Ricard Fellow 2017), Ieva Balode, Yaïr Barelli, Aia Bertrand, Raymond Duncan, Ieva Epnere, Barbara Gaile, Daiga Grantina, Myriam Lefkowitz, Mai-Thu Perret, Andrejs Strokins
Curators: Solvita Krese & Inga Lāce (Latvian Center for Contemporary Art)

Associate pro­gram­ming curator: Camille Chenais

The exhi­bi­tion “Akademia: Performing Life” will look at nar­ra­tives and themes springing from Akademia, a com­mu­nity and an alter­na­tive school that offered courses in dance, art and crafts, hosted an art gallery and a pub­lishing house and staged the­atre and dance pieces between the 1910s and 1970s in Paris. Established by Raymond Duncan, American dancer and artist, and since the 1920s co- run by Aia Bertrand, a dancer, writer and an expa­triate from Latvia, the Akademia was a man­i­fes­ta­tion of their ide­o­log­ical syn­cretism blending socialist prin­ci­ples, the desire to revive ancient Greece and a “nat­ural” Latvian way of life. The exhi­bi­tion aims to explore the ideas and prin­ci­ples embodied by Akademia at its incep­tion as poten­tial alter­na­tives to tra­di­tional models of edu­ca­tion, cre­ation and com­mu­nity life, while also ques­tioning its more obscure aspects.
More info here

Mercedes Azpilicueta
Pink pop­ping plank, 2018
A sculp­ture, a set, a script, a score
Courtesy Mercedes Azpilicueta

Mercedes Azpilicueta pre­sents here what she calls “scripts”: embroi­deries on plastic sheets where almost hiero­glyphic draw­ings create an empir­ical and sub­jec­tive mnemonic system. These works form a score and starting point for the devel­op­ment of her per­for­ma­tive work. During the exhi­bi­tion, she will hold sev­eral work­shops during which she will reflect on a set of mate­rials that inform a script in pro­cess. Using the body as a medium, this set of mate­rials will be altered, trans­lated, added to, extracted, reme­di­ated and ques­tioned. This mul­ti­dis­ci­plinary prac­tice, com­prising embroi­dery, drawing, per­for­mance, dance and everyday life, echoes the vision of art devel­oped at the Akademia, as a unique con­struc­tion com­bining dance, music, poetry, crafts and visual arts in the same move­ment.

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PUBLIC WORKSHOPS


We Are Not The Number That We Thing We Are


At Cité Internationale des Arts / studio 8217 - 2e étage bâti­ment A
February 2nd- February 3rd, 2018

More info to come.

“We are not the number we think we are” will offer a unique expe­ri­ence for 36 hours non-stop, involving hun­dreds of artists, researchers and thinkers from var­ious geo­graph­ical and dis­ci­plinary back­grounds. At the heart of the pro­ject: within working spaces, focusing on hetero­ge­neous groups of people and col­lec­tives, gath­ered tem­porarily around pressing issues of our con­tem­po­rary world. They will take over mul­tiple spaces within the Cité inter­na­tionale des arts in Paris, a meeting ground open to the dia­logue between cul­tures where vis­i­tors will be invited to reflect on the pre­sent and map together path­ways for the future. The common thread of this bound­less pro­gramme is the fic­tional world of The Compass Rose (1982) a book of short sto­ries by science fic­tion writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

More infor­ma­tion here.