The ¡Viva Villa! festival was created in 2016 on the initiative of Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto and the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici. It was born of a common desire to create a regular event presented in France and to bring together the artists, creators and researchers hosted by these three French institutions located abroad.
Organised every two years in the form of a biennial, this event offers a glimpse of the diversity of the residents’ work through proposals that decompartmentalise the aesthetic field and encourage dialogue between different disciplines.
This year, ¡Viva Villa! will once again focus on getting the practitioners to speak from the place of their practice by presenting their work in the form of a multidisciplinary group exhibition, a live performance programme and a publication.
Entitled Ce à quoi nous tenons, the 2022 edition refers to the text by the ecofeminist philosopher Émilie Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons – Propositions pour une écologie pragmatique, published by Éditions La Découverte in 2011.
The question of ecology occupies a central place in this edition of the festival in that it is invested by contemporary creators and researchers, often thought in conjunction with feminisms, the question of struggles, and more broadly in relation to the emergence of new moral and political experiments.
The question of hospitality (that of the artists in residence, but also to the audiences of cultural institutions) is also at the heart of the artistic project of ¡ Viva Villa!
The opening of the exhibition will be followed, still at the Collection Lambert, by a rich programme of concerts and performances, and then by a professional day proposed in association with the Région Sud: a forum allowing artists to meet cultural structures for the continuation of their artistic and research projects initiated during their residency.
Victorine Grataloup is a curator and researcher, co-founder of the artistic exchange, research and translation platform Qalqalah قلقلة (with Virginie Bobin) as well as the curatorial collective Le Syndicat Magnifique (with Thomas Conchou, Anna Frera and Carin Klonowski). She studied art history and theory at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), the Humboldt Universität (Berlin) and the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she now teaches art economics, and worked at the Palais de Tokyo, KADIST, Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche and the Cneai before becoming an independent curator. Her work is transdisciplinary and collaborative, at the intersection of artistic, political and social issues.
In 2020-2021, she is a laureate of the curatorial research grant of the Centre national des arts plastiques with a project on the acquisitions of artists from the Maghreb, the Mashreq and the Arabian Peninsula, and works in parallel with the École des Actes, an experimental cultural micro-institution working between languages from the situation of Aubervilliers and Seine-Saint-Denis.
Stéphane Ibars joined the Collection Lambert team in 2006 to develop communication, cultural programming (symposia, conferences, film screenings, meetings, readings, concerts, music festivals), the place of dance-performance and the various partnerships with regional, national and international cultural structures. He then became one of its curators and is currently its deputy artistic director.
At the same time, he teaches contemporary art history, aesthetics and the history of countercultures in various universities (Nîmes, Montpellier, Avignon), at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon, and develops an independent curatorial activity through which he questions the links between contemporary art and countercultures. His objects of study are: the emergence of the new American avant-gardes in the 1960s-1970s and their influence on the art of the last 40 years; the alternative New York scenes in the 1980s-1990s; feminist artistic practices; the relationship between contemporary art scenes and countercultures. Some exhibitions at the Collection Lambert: I Will Reflect What You Are (Intimacy in the Lambert Collection); From Their Time 6, Collecting in the 21st Century (ADIAF), Basquiat Remix (Basquiat, Picasso, Matisse, Twombly); Miryam Haddad, Le sommeil n’est pas un lieu sûr (Sleep is not a safe place); Various Days (Delgado + Fuchs, Zimoun); Francesco Vezzoli, Le lacrime dei poeti (Francesco Vezzoli looks at Cy Twombly, Louise Lawler, Giulio Paolini); Claire Tabouret, Les veilleurs; Knusa / Insert Coins (Cindy Van Acker, Christian Lutz); Mémoires sauvées du vent (Jeunes diplômés des écoles de Marseille, Arles, Avignon); Amos Gitai, Chronique d’un assassinat annoncé; Lawrence Weiner, De l’autre côté du fleuve; as well as the hangings of the collection.
