Translatio

On the occasion of the exhibition Shared Holy Places exhibition at Villa Médicis, Clovis Maillet and Nicolas Sarzeaud, residents at Villa Médicis from 2024-2025, have devised two study days designed to highlight the sharing of narratives between different cultural spheres.

These days will focus on the Christian story: as the bearer of a universal vocation, the Church has sought to spread its message as widely as possible. This desire for expansion has led to forms of cultural hybridization – sometimes controlled, often unforeseen – that still nourish contemporary creation today.

By combining scientific research and artistic practices, these meetings offer a journey through a Christianity in transformation, at the crossroads of multiple influences.

Biographies

Nicolas Sarzeaud

Nicolas Sarzeaud is an FRS-FNRS research fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain. A graduate of the École du Louvre, in 2021 he defended a thesis at EHESS on the cult of the Shrouds of Christ between the 14th and 16th centuries, published by Cerf in 2024 under the title Les Suaires du Christ en Occident (The Shrouds of Christ in the West) (Provins Prize 2025). A former resident of the Villa Medici, he has taught at Lumière Lyon II University and the University of Lorraine and published numerous articles on the cult of images in the late Middle Ages and how they were displayed, viewed, and disseminated through the intensive production of copies.

Clovis Maillet

Clovis Maillet is a medieval historian and artist. A specialist in issues of gender and kinship in medieval visual culture, he is the author of La parenté hagiographique (2014), Les genres fluides. De Jeanne d’Arc aux saintes trans (2020), Un Moyen Âge émancipateur (2021), and Écotransféminismes (with E. Bigé, 2025) . Since the early 2000s, he has been developing an artistic practice combining performance, installation, and film. He also co-wrote the show Medieval Crack with the Foulles collective.

Victor Barabino

Victor Barabino is an assistant professor of ancient and medieval history at the University of Lorraine. After completing his thesis at the University of Caen Normandy, he devoted his research to the interactions between religious and military culture in medieval Scandinavia.

Vir Andres Hera

Vir Andres Hera is an artist whose practice unfolds through multi-channel film installations, sound compositions, performances, and critical writings. His work explores the intertwined dynamics of diasporic consciousness, exile, gender identity, and memory through a radically deconstructed cinematic language. Formally rooted in expanded cinema, his approach challenges linear narrative structures by embracing fragmentation, superimposition, multilingualism, and temporal disjunction.

Drawing on collective and personal archives, she assembles audiovisual montages that destabilize hegemonic narratives while highlighting marginalized voices. Her works often emerge as poetic assemblages where the visual, textual, and sonic coexist in affective spaces of resonance. They articulate queer, Chicana, and Afrodiasporic epistemologies and challenge colonial frameworks embedded in visual culture. His artistic practice resists closure and embraces multiplicity, creating constellations of images, gestures, and languages that reconfigure the experience of time, voice, and identity.

A graduate of Le Fresnoy, Mo.Co. Montpellier, and UQAM in Montreal, Vir Andres Hera has been in residence at Casa de Velázquez (2015-16), Triangle-Astérides (2021), Breaking Bread, Cape Town (2023), and Salzburger Kunstverein (2024), among others. His work has been presented internationally, notably at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Gaîté Lyrique, Mimosa House London, and Luma Foundation Westbau. His installation Amoxtli recently received the Jeune Création Internationale award at the Lyon Biennale, and in the same year the Centre Pompidou dedicated an evening retrospective to him.

In 2025, he was a finalist for the Prix Visio in Florence and was in residence at CIAPV Vassivière and the Carasso Foundation in Madrid. In 2026, he is preparing his next installation, Incwadi, and has been invited to the Juan Soriano Museum (MX), STUK Leuven (BE), and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (AU) for a major exhibition on indigenous diasporas. He directed the master’s program at the École Expérimentale d’Annecy-Alpes between 2021 and 2025 and joined the teaching team at Villa Arson in 2025. He is also a member of the editorial board of Qalqalah قلقلة, a transdisciplinary research and translation platform.

Elise Haddad

Élise Haddad holds a doctorate in history and civilizations from EHESS in Paris. She initially worked on images from the European Middle Ages, particularly monumental and manuscript images of the Apocalypse, their iconography, and their social uses, before training in Mesoamerican languages and cultures, which now allows her to expand her corpus to include monumental images from New Spain in the early decades of the Conquest. She will present some of these images from the early 16th century during the study days at the Villa Medici. Created in mixed contexts, by Europeans or the first generation of indigenous people educated in missionary schools, for Europeans or the very first indigenous converts to Christianity, they bear witness to the encounter, the clash, and the strategies implemented to reconcile two visual cultures and multiple affiliations.

Dario Biancullo

Dario Biancullo (1986) is a designer, activist, and multidisciplinary artist trained in

Forcella (NA) in the Naples area. He investigates and produces new and alternative social methods of queer and transfeminist denunciation and collective/community self-determination for deviance with the aim of an intersectional practice of participatory, performative, and visual art with self-investigations: videos, environmental installations, aerosol art on fabrics, and poster displays in public and private spaces, galleries, theaters, foundations, and non-profit spaces. It traverses and denounces the world of fashion.

In collaboration with the founders of Atn (Trans Naples Association) and Afan (Antiche Femminelle Napoli) and important figures in ancient Neapolitan queer theater, it carries out activities of mutual recognition, archive sharing, and cross-pollination between the new and the old, folklore, the sacred, ritual, and dissident thought.

Anti-patriarchal thought is visualized together with his “queer” community.

Co-founder of an artistic organization—Korybass (derived from Coribanti)—which weaves a relationship of inclusivity in the Mediterranean region by combining tradition and new hyperstition of the possible and the real, producing militancy and vision, spirituality and sacred-queer blasphemy through meetings, talks, healing rituals, and participatory performance art.