A residency at the Maison Flottante in October 2026.
Anna Pichot graduated from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg, where she completed a dual degree in Fine Arts and Illustration. This multidisciplinary training enabled her to develop a practice at the intersection of writing, visual arts, and publishing.
Text and poetry occupy a central place in her work. Throughout her research, she has explored these concerns through publishing, drawing, and painting, as well as through performative formats and exhibition-making. Her practice investigates the ways in which visual forms can accompany, extend, or transform the experience of a text. Public readings and performance now constitute significant dimensions of her work. She develops publications conceived as activatable objects, alongside exhibition projects created in collaboration with other artists. Her interest lies as much in writing itself as in the conditions of its reception: how a text can be read, seen, or heard, and how different media can construct around it a shared atmosphere and a sensitive, embodied experience.
She is currently pursuing this line of inquiry within the Master’s programme in Creative Writing at the University of Le Havre Normandy, where she continues to deepen her engagement with writing while maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the visual, editorial, and performative forms that inform her practice. In 2026, Anna Pichot received the Cneai’s Rivers & Waterways Prize for her project When I Become Water, a research project she will further develop during a one-month residency at the Maison Flottante.
Projects
When I Become Water is an illustrated publishing project accompanied by a performance. Initiated through research into hydrofeminist theories, the project explores the relationships of interdependence, circulation, and transformation that connect bodies to one another and to their environment.
During this residency, Anna Pichot aims to extend this reflection through direct engagement with the territory, the water, and the river. Her interest encompasses both the river’s history and uses, as well as the sensitive, emotional, and symbolic relationships that local inhabitants maintain with it. Through this immersion, she seeks to deepen several questions currently at the heart of her practice, particularly those concerning home, dwelling, and motherhood: what makes a place inhabited? How are bonds of belonging, transmission, and community formed within it? How does a collective body, a family, or a space of coexistence come into being?
Water functions here as a prism through which to consider these relationships in terms of movement, transformation, and continuity. The residency would therefore constitute a period of research, encounters, and writing, nourished by observation of the territory and exchanges with its inhabitants. From this experience could emerge a text that is both poetic and theoretical, accompanied by a publication bringing together multiple media—texts, illustrations, and photographs produced or collected during the residency. This work could also take the form of a performative reading, in which the publication and images contribute to the spatial staging of the text.
A further avenue of development would be to extend this research through Where Are the Poets?, a platform created by the artist to encourage the circulation of poetry and to foster connections between texts, people, and territories. Within this framework, she envisions the creation of a poetic pathway rooted in the river landscape and the residency’s surrounding territory. This proposal intentionally remains open-ended and may evolve according to the research undertaken and the encounters made on site.
Partners
The residency is supported and accompanied by:
the Haute École des Arts du Rhin.