Villa Medici supports fellows in their post-residency career and encourages the circulation of their work in France through two initiatives: ¡ Viva Villa ! and production grants.
Created in 2016, ¡ Viva Villa ! is an initiative that involves the major French residences outside of France: Villa Medici (Rome), Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) – and since 2023, with Villa Medici Albertine (USA). Working together to provide professional support for their former residents fellows, the four Villa Medici residencies have developed ¡Viva Villa! in the form of an event that has spread throughout the network of cultural institutions, theaters, festivals, stages and art centers in France and abroad. The idea? To co-produce a dozen or so projects throughout France each season (exhibitions, concerts, performances, publishing and radio projects), highlighting the work of creators from the four institutions. This program gives French audiences the chance to discover the work they have done during their residencies in Rome, Madrid, Kyoto and the United States. Since 2023, !Viva Villa! has been taking over the Gaîté Lyrique (Paris) in the autumn for the grand rendez-vous of the four residencies, with professional meetings and a festival programme open to the public.
This group exhibition highlights the living memories of the art center through a fertile dialogue between works by artists from different generations, within the newly reconfigured spaces of the two factories: Le Creux de l’Enfer and Le May. In this way, works by major figures on the international art scene sit alongside those of younger artists, created as part of residencies in Thiers or around the world. The exhibition IN VIVO rekindles powerful past experiences in light of the questions that permeate today’s artistic expressions. It showcases the driving forces of the art center—a place of commitment and constant reinvention—that have animated the Vallée des Usines for forty years.
Following in the footsteps of philosopher Vinciane Despret in her book Les morts à l’œuvre (2023), the exhibition Tactical Specters questions our relationship with the deceased and our heritage. It looks at the place the deceased occupy in our daily lives, and the relationships we maintain with them beyond their passing.
This exhibition is being held at two venues, 40mcube in Rennes and Mécènes du Sud in Montpellier, at almost the same time, with the same artists. The origin of the exhibition Elle empêche les choses de dormir is the observation of a missing word, absent representations, the gaping hole of a collective memory. And it’s the shared desire to see it as a space for fiction with real potential. Here, the narratives of minority communities are reinvested through works that breathe new life into silent words.
The radio festival “La déesse aux cent bouches” (The Goddess of a Hundred Mouths) aims to explore the multiple forms of orality and the various ways in which the voice appears, from noise to narrative, by crossing literary, performative, visual and musical practices. The evening of November 8 will feature meetings and interviews, discussions, recordings of new productions and live performances broadcast live on *Duuu Radio.
To mark the 7th edition of the ¡Viva Villa! festival, Collection Lambert, a long-standing partner of the event, is proposing a transdisciplinary project entitled TRANSFORMER.S. , a long-term program hosted by the Avignon institution from May 25, 2024.
For its latest issue, IF magazine is taking part in the ¡Viva Villa! 2024-2025 season with a special edition featuring only artists who have taken part in France’s international residency programs (Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis in Rome, Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto and Villa Albertine in the USA).
As part of the Lyon Biennial, Alix Boillot presents two salt installations (L’Éternité (2) and Lacrymatoires) and a performance (L’Éternité (1)) on October 12 and 13.
This project was conceived as an extension of Hélène Bertin’s residencies at Villa Medici (Rome) and Sébastien Desplat’s at Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto). Engaged in an artistic exploration of living resources, popular and artisanal know-how and their links with natural materials, they will be accompanied by an imagière, Bettina Henni, and a specialist craftswoman. plant colors, Lola Verstrepen. Travelling back and forth between Rome, Marseille and the Luberon, these four creators will combine their sensibilities and techniques for an original joint production that will be presented on Saturday August 31 at 11am at Studio Fotokino for the opening of a joint exhibition running until September 21.
The MAT program focuses on water in all its forms, from sensitive to poetic to scientific approaches. Following a series of encounters from May 14 to 17, the program includes screenings and workshops open to all, in collaboration with the École des beaux-arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, the École supérieure d’art et de design TALM and the École primaire Joachim Du Bellay de Montrelais. The “Nous les vagues” exhibition explores local water resources with a transdisciplinary approach.
Through a system of production grants, Villa Medici supports its fellows artists by co-financing, with the help of cultural partners, the projects they initiate during their residency in Rome. One of Villa Medici’s concerns is to think about the post-residency period as part of a collaborative approach. The introduction of this support scheme in 2018 has enabled many partners to be involved, creating an essential leverage effect so that the artists’ projects can successfully see the light of day.
Set in little-known parts of Le Havre, Tempesta echoes the myth of Prometheus and the history of the city’s destruction. In a tableau that brings together the present and the ancient, Mali Arun summons young dancers into a world of light and shadow. Chevaldeuxtrois and Un Été Au Havre present, in coproduction with the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis, a film by Mali Arun produced by Jérémy Forni.
Witting Vitium is the first solo exhibition by artist Madison Bycroft. The exhibition will feature the film The Sauce Of All Order (2024), commissioned by steirischer herbst ’24 and co-produced with the Villa Médicis – Académie de France à Rome. Through a singular cinematic practice, Bycroft explores themes such as the instability of subjectivities, economies of understanding, fluidity, trans* studies and language.
Julie Pellegrin, renowned curator and art critic, reflects on the political effects of contemporary performance art. Nine artists, all valued friends and collaborators, engage with the author in dialogues about how work intertwines with life. These conversations are accompanied by a personal essay on the affinities between artistic practice and a renewed interest in anarchist thought. This story, which began in Rome’s legendary Attico gallery in the 1960s, unfolds in various parts of the world in the context of current crises. It affirms art’s capacity to formulate new political imaginaries when it embraces possibilities for living differently – ungovernable ways of being and relating.
The exhibition, through archival materials, recounts several chapters of the Carrara-born architect’s contribution to this long and complex project, which occupied him for over forty years (1926–1968). Imprinting his visionary mark on the site, Del Debbio designed an architectural and landscape work in which the buildings would interact with the surrounding nature, and where marble—in its various structural or decorative uses—would play a central role in the development of a personal poetics, balanced between classicism and modernity.
The Enrico Del Debbio Archive, one of the first to enter the MAXXI Architecture Collection, documents the architect’s activity from 1909 to the 1970s, and in particular his most significant project: the Foro Italico complex.
The archival materials enter into dialogue with contemporary photographs by Begoña Zubero, specially created for the exhibition.
Hugo Drubay has embarked on a project to revisit the Medici vase, a piece of neo-Attic art exhibited at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. This reinvented vase can be seen from January 16 to 29, 2025 at Féau Boiseries in Paris, as part of an exhibition with Mobilier national and Invisible Collection.
After following her lumberjack husband into the forest, a woman abandons herself to a monotonous life, witnessing the destruction of nature. A budding passion with a student turns her life upside down: her body transforms into a tree. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Like flesh, with libretto by Cordelia Lynn and music by Sivan Eldar, explores the ecological crisis and our conflicting relationship with nature. Using IRCAM technology, the composer deploys an enveloping forest of sound, via some sixty loudspeakers integrated into the auditorium, in response to Maxime Pascal conducting Le Balcon.
This work marks the emergence of a new generation of committed opera artists, reinventing opera as a sensory and political experience. Silvia Costa, already acclaimed for her staging of Boesmans’ Julie, here transforms the stage into a universe in mutation, amplified by Francesco D’Abbraccio’s videos. Winner of the FEDORA prize, Like Flesh was performed for the first time in Lille in 2022, and hailed as a highlight of the lyrical revival.
Like Flesh, recorded live at the Opéra de Lille by the b-records label, will be released as a book-disc on July 4, 2025. This book-album is co-produced by the Villa Medici.
On April 4, 2025, Marion Grébert (resident 2022-2023) published a book of essays on art entitled Why flowers. Another trip to Italy published by L’Atelier contemporain. This book, the culmination of her residency project, is co-produced with the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis and published with the support of the Centre national du livre.
Anyone who tries to cross the Mediterranean today, or even travel on foot, by bike or on horseback, will see that the territory is closing in, both through its physical layout and through the law.
This movement is part of a centuries-old trend. Since the dawn of modernity, there has been a progressive ban on the right to roam and subsist freely on the land.
From an ecological and ethical point of view, however, it is vital to rediscover a world that is porous and traversable, both for humans and for other living beings.
The very notion of right – the Greek nomos – which refers to a grazing area, has been interpreted in modern times as enclosure. But it is just as legitimate to conceive of it as a shared, common space.
Under the aegis of the god Hermes, this free collection takes us to medieval villages and countryside, along the GR2013 in Marseille, to the Villa Borghese in Rome – echoing a photographic essay by Geoffroy Mathieu.
Le Service des Panacées (Panacea Service) brings literature and medicine together through a multidisciplinary approach. It invites patients to state a “disorder”, which it responds to during a consultation by prescribing books of literature, along with their dosage.
These participatory performances feed into the creation of a medical dictionary of literature, the writing of fiction, and research into questions of bibliotherapy, the impact of reading, and the physicality of books. In parallel, Laure Limongi creates plastic forms (Scarificatures, Dagalibri shown at Frac), videos (such as Auscultations de livres also shown), sound pieces… At Frac Sud, Laure Limongi continues her research at the heart of the Centre de documentation recherche, working in particular on the corpus of ephemeral libraries. As a result, her bibliography of prescriptions has been expanded to include books of literature from past exhibitions. These will be offered to Frac Sud users, who will be able to sign up for a performance consultation. During this residency, Laure Limongi is also pursuing her writing and production of plastic pieces.
A discussion of Mounir Ayache’s work, in the presence of the artist, curator Anne Bourrassé and artist Yasmina Benabderrahmane (resident at the Villa Médicis in 2023).
