2022 - 2023 : residency / exhibition & meetings

During the two-year residency, the artist set out to reflect on the location of the art center, its context and the relationships that could arise within the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (CiuP). The artist began by meeting with various local associations in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and CiuP residents (Les archéologues amateurs du 14ème, les Sirènes, les jardiniers de la cité, technicians, Théâtre de la Cité Universitaire, etc.) to develop and initiate her research into the area. A place of cultural and social diversity, the CiuP has also generated enormous questions about its organization, its internal exchanges between institutions and the complexity of a place welcoming students from all over the world.
In September 2022, five months after the start of her residency, Amalia Laurent materialized this encounter with the CiuP through five monumental fabrics adorning the majestic hall of the Maison Internationale. This first intervention, the culmination of several months’ exploration alongside CiuP residents, was intended to accompany Sustainable Development Week and the Fête des Jardins. Punctuated by conferences, debates, workshops and visits to the garden, the artist’s exhibition was intended to directly invite the outdoor space of the CiuP gardens into the very heart of the place that organizes and manages it. More specifically, the artist’s aim was to question how the order established almost 100 years ago - i.e., spaces for circulation, living, relaxing or working, protected outdoor spaces or not - could be broken down and observed simultaneously - daydreaming fits into a corridor, trees intrude between stone columns…

2023 - 2024 : residency / workshops & exhibition

The year 2023, will focus on putting this confrontation of spaces into daily practice. But how to describe this encounter between real and fictional places? Despite the artist’s initial intervention, which was intended to provoke the order of the CiuP’s spaces, it would seem that, after a multitude of interviews, the students themselves are provoking this breach on a daily basis. How, then, do these confrontations of spaces arise?
Working with the Lycée Apollinaire de Thiais Lycée Apollinaire de Thiais, the artist attempted to break down and recompose these mechanisms of space-making. During the various workshops, each class - HLP final year, first and final year in musical composition and second year in history and geography - created a corpus of texts, music and/or maps to illustrate and understand how a place can be transformed by the imaginary. The building of a library of landscapes by students from the Lycée de Thiais helped to identify these moments of apparitions, encouraging them to reflect on how to generate, describe and finally classify them.
At the end of the residency, Amalia Laurent invited the Laurent Roque duo - artist and architect Delphine Roque - to reconstruct the entire exhibition space at cneai =. The work “A Multiple Room You May Have Missed”, conceived as an installation, allows visitors to explore the space in different ways. The main tent, covered in white fabric, is a space for play and exchange. Laurent Roque’s rooms are places of fiction, conducive to narratives and interrelations. During this monumental exhibition, open from December 1, 2023 to February 8, 2024, a number of fictional spaces came to life, thanks to a musical performance based on three poems by J.R.R Tolkien, set to music by Yndi Da Silva and performed by Estelle Micheau, with a reading of the poems by Enora Jung, the work of students from the Lycée de Thiais covering the space of the main tent, and flutist Swann Perisse. Likewise, without being the product of illusion, the installation could be transformed into an exhibition, a market - through the display and sale of works by artists Jeanne Moynot, Gorge Bataille, Anna George Lopez, Louise Siffert, Hortense Belhôte, Anna Byskov, Anouchka Oler Nussbaum - as well as a playground, housing archivists, students and sleepers.

Tailor-made support

The artist is supported throughout her residency, according to the rhythm of her research, encounters and dissemination. The entire project was designed to follow the artist’s personal work and its links with the context and possibilities for encounters, jointly desired with the aim of developing territorial anchorage and extending the artist’s theoretical research to new specific contexts.
Amalia Laurent was accompanied by several members of the team, who also curated her exhibitions.
The main objectives of the residency were

• theoretical support
• coordination of meetings with local and regional partners (CiuP and Paris 14th associations, Thiais high school, etc.)
• support for interventions in schools
• curating of exhibitions (solo shows at cneai =) and mediation on her work (visits, exhibition openings, organization of performances, etc.)
• communication and visibility development
  
  
  There are many follow-up projects, as the artist continues his thesis and joins the prestigious Villa Médicis for the start of the academic year in September 2024. We continue to accompany him on a long-term, publishing-oriented post-residency. A fruitful collaboration, made possible by the unanimous enthusiasm, quality and relevance of Amalia Laurent’s work.
  
  
  

Partner

As part of the regional program Résidences d'artistes de la Région Île-de-France.