White Night

Born in France in 1991, Samir Amarouch is a composer and guitarist. He studied guitar at the Conservatoire de Boulogne-Billancourt and musicology at the Sorbonne. In 2015, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse. The transposition of sounds from natural, urban and technological environments is one of the major sources of his compositional work. Inspired by structuralist, minimalist and spectral currents, as well as traditional oriental and electronic music, his latest works focus on the perception of time and rhythm, and on the ambiguity between timbre and harmony. Winner of several international prizes, including the Ernst Von Siemens Foundation Composition Prize in 2020, his music has been performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre National de France, the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble InterContemporain.

Born in 1991, French-Moroccan artist Mounir Ayache’s technological creations invite us to take a fresh look at the political and social realities of the Arab world. Using the codes of science fiction to blend family histories and the imaginary reappropriation of Arab experiences and identities, he is part of the unofficial current of Arabfuturism, influenced by the Afrofuturism of the 1990s, which draws on fiction to propose alternative narratives. Mounir Ayache apes representations of the Other and the Stranger in Western fiction, and uses new technologies to realize and transmit his ideas, blurring the boundaries between contemporary art and entertainment.

Yasmina Benabderrahmane graduated from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 2009 and from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains de Tourcoing in 2015. She works experimentally with film and silver photography. Her instinctive artistic practice lies halfway between documentary and filmed diary, and mainly takes the form of multimedia installations. She collects and probes the visible world and the people she loves and who surround her. Her work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and is part of both private and public collections. In 2018, she received the Solveig-Anspach Prize and was named Révélation Photographie – Laureate of the Prix LE BAL de la Jeune Création 2019 with ADAGP.
In 2021, she won the national photographic commission “Regards du Grand Paris – Année 6” (CNAP – Ateliers Médicis).

Born in Paris in 1980, Hortense de Corneillan is a heritage restorer specializing in ceramics and glass. With degrees in art history, museology (École du Louvre) and conservation-restoration (Institut national du patrimoine), she has been living in Switzerland since 2008. After 11 years working for a museum, she is now a freelance artist. She works for Swiss and European institutions in the fields of archaeology and decorative arts. An important part of her activity is devoted to teaching. She is a lecturer at the Haute École Arc Conservation-restoration (HE-Arc CR, Neuchâtel), where she also coordinates continuing education for conservation professionals.

Alongside her training as an actress, Lorraine de Sagazan studied philosophy. In order to train as a director, she left for Berlin in 2014 to assist Thomas Ostermeier. On her return, she worked on adaptations of repertory texts: Lars Noren’s Demons, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Anton Chekhov’s L’Absence de père, presented at the Nuits de Fourvière, Centquatre and MC93, among others.

In 2020, she began a new cycle of work questioning how fiction can respond to reality. This research gave rise to her first two shows, La Vie invisible and Un sacre, created at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis, where she is associate artist. Her multi-faceted projects, at the crossroads of performance, the performing arts and the visual arts, have been exported both abroad and throughout France.

Born in Paris in 1980, Dorothée Dupuis is a curator, art critic and publisher of contemporary art. Her practice focuses on the intersection between art and politics, seen from transfeminist, post-Marxist, decolonial and anti-racist perspectives. Since 2013, she has been the director and founder of Terremoto magazine and Temblores Publicaciones publishing house, based in Mexico City. Before moving to Mexico in 2012, she was director of the Triangle-Astérides contemporary art and residency center in Marseille from 2007 to 2012, and assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou from 2005 to 2007. Since 2012, Dorothée Dupuis has worked as an independent curator, writing about the art of the Americas for Terremoto and international publications.

Born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1968, François Durif is a writer and artist. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, his work constantly questions the status of the contemporary artist and his prerogatives. In his first exhibitions, he alternated between interior decorator and plasterer-painter, developing an art of discretion. Each time, he takes a long-term approach, recording his actions in situ and producing a text documenting his progress. Following a skills assessment, he left the art world to become a funeral assistant and master of ceremonies at the Parisian undertaker L’Autre Rive (2005-2008). Twelve years later, he looks back on this singular experience in his first story, Vide sanitaire, published by Verticales in October 2021. He addresses the reader with the same frankness as during his performances in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1985, composer Sivan Eldar holds a PhD in composition from UC Berkeley, before joining IRCAM in Paris to follow the Cursus de composition et d’informatique musicale (2017). His music, published by Éditions Durand, has been described as “meditative and captivating” (L’Humanité), “of great refinement” (ResMusica) and “with a unique sensitivity to dramaturgy” (Diapason). Her most recent creations include Like Flesh (Operas Lille, Montpellier, Lorraine, Antwerp), After Arethusa (Venice Biennale, Louvre Auditorium), Una Mujer Derramada (Théâtre du Châtelet), Heave (Centre Pompidou, Opéra de Marseille, November Musique) and Solicitations (Philharmonie Luxembourg, Ultraschall Berlin, Festival Présences, Wien Modern). She recently won the Fedora Opéra 2021 prize, and has been a resident at the Villa Albertine, the Colonie MacDowell and the Camargo, Civitella Ranieri, Singer-Polignac, Royaumont and Fulbright foundations.  

Marion Grébert is an alumna of the École normale supérieure de Lyon, from the arts department and the comparative literature section. After earning a doctorate in art history, she published her first essay in October 2022, Crossing the invisible. Figurative enigmas by Francesca Woodman and Vivian Maier published by Atelier contemporain in Strasbourg. The book was awarded the Prix André Malraux 2022. Her career is characterized by a combination of academic, theoretical and practical training. Throughout her thesis, from 2014 to 2019, she gained a number of professional experiences (lecturer in art history at Paris-IV-Sorbonne Universités from 2014 to 2017, intern-assistant in photographic conservation at the Musée d’Orsay in 2014 and at MoMA in New York in 2017). Once she has obtained her doctorate, she will continue her research with post-doctoral fellowships: the Balzan Foundation (Switzerland) in partnership with Paris-III-Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2019-2020 and the Terra Foundation for American Art (USA) in partnership with INHA (Paris) in 2021-2022. Marion Grébert is also a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2015). Photography remains at the heart of her approach, in the tradition of writer-photographers.

Bocar Niang was born into a griot family on June 8, 1987 in Tambacounda, Senegal. He holds a Master’s degree in arts and culture from the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar and the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. He is currently developing a thesis on research and artistic creation within the RADIAN doctoral program. Founder of the Musée griot in Senegal and its branches in France, he has also been artistic director of the Tamba Jeunes Talents Festival in Senegal since 2008, and of the Nekkalante Festival in France since 2018. His multidisciplinary work combines orality, installation, writing, sculpture, film, video and music. It has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Ricard, Dakar Biennale, Cenon Biennale, Ygrec-Ensapc, Laboratoires d’Aubervillers and Musée Théodore Monod in Dakar, among others.

Lasseindra Ninja has been a Paris-based dancer and choreographer for over ten years. Trained in France and the United States, she has developed her artistic practice through the organization of major balls, choreographic creations and solo and collaborative performances. In her work, she is interested in the identities and spaces that exist between the real and the virtual, from the stage to the screen and vice versa: when and under what conditions can movement be performed, and how is it perceived and judged. Her work is based on pan-African and transatlantic vectors within a contemporary reflection on the history of bodies, and the traces and reminiscences of collective dance experiences. A pioneer of the Ballroom Scene in Europe, she founded the Eurasian chapter of the International & Iconic House of Ninja. Recognized within the international Ballroom community with the title of Légende, she now explores the fields of contemporary creation, musical composition and digital arts (photo and video) within prestigious institutions such as the Centre national de la danse and the Ballet national de Marseille.

Born in 1985, Liv Schulman grew up in Buenos Aires, where she attended public school. Fascinated by television, the arrival of cable in 1990 and the financial crash of 2001 are among the most significant moments in her life. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, she has lived in France since 2015. Liv Schulman’s work takes the form of filmed fictions, TV series, readings-performances and novel writing. The discourses at the heart of her work deal with the place of subjectivity in the political space and the difficulty of giving it credence. For example, she shows a real telenovela on television as if it were a museum. In her approach, to create means to directly experience an environment, a system, a subject. Her work has been exhibited at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris, the CAC La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Crac Alsace, the Steirischer Herbst festival in Austria, the Fondation Ricard in Paris, the SMK in Copenhagen, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska. She has benefited from the ADAGP grant, the patronage of the Fondation des Artistes, the DAAD residency program in Germany, and was awarded the Prix Ricard in 2018.

Anna Solal was born in Dreux in 1988. She lives and works in Paris. She belongs to a new generation of artists distinguished by a predilection for the “handmade”, for the non-hierarchical cross-fertilization of processes borrowed from art and craft. Her assemblages are made from discarded objects gleaned from her wanderings. They are recomposed into aerial motifs, like birds or kites. Brutally figurative, this pop iconography, anxious and moving, highlights the isolation of the individual and a form of abstraction in which he or she navigates. Anna Solal has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the CAC Passerelle in Brest, the Musée des abattoirs in Toulouse, and Interstate Projects (New York).

After studying law and philosophy at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Sarah Vanuxem defended a thesis entitled Des choses saisies par la propriété (preface by Th. Revet, Institut de Recherches Juridiques de la Sorbonne, 2012). A lecturer at the Université Côte d’Azur Law School since 2012, her research lies at the crossroads of property law and environmental law, with forays into environmental philosophy, anthropology of nature and legal history. She has co-edited, with C. Guibet-Lafaye, the book Repenser la propriété, un essai de politique écologique (Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2015), written various articles and is, notably, the author of two essays: La propriété de la terre (Wildproject, 2018) and Des choses de la nature et de leurs droits (Quae, 2020).

Ariane Varela Braga is an art and architecture historian. She has taught at the Universities of Zurich (2014-2019), where she is preparing her habilitation thesis, and Geneva (2019-2020), and as a visiting professor at the University of Milan (2022). Her research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Art-Bibliotheca Hertziana, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Fondation Gandur pour l’art. In 2021, she was awarded an André Chastel Fellowship from the Villa Médicis and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art. A former member of the Swiss Institute of Rome, she is a research associate at HISTARA/EPHE and co-founder and coordinator of NeReMa-International network for research on marble and decorative stones. Her research lies at the intersection of art history, architecture and material culture. Her doctoral thesis, defended at the University of Neuchâtel in 2013, was published under the title Une théorie universelle au milieu duXIXe century. The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones (Campisano, 2017). She is the author of several articles and books on the theory of ornament, Orientalism in the decorative arts and architecture, and marble. In parallel with her research activities, she is an independent curator of exhibitions on the arts of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Laura Vazquez is a writer. She has published several books of poetry with various publishers, including La main de la main (Prix de la Vocation) with éditions Cheyne in 2014, and Vous êtes de moins en moins réels with éditions Points in 2022. His first novel, La semaine perpétuelle, was published by Sous-sol in 2021. It won the Prix Wepler special mention and the Prix de la page 111. Her epic, Le livre du large et du long, was published in March 2023 by Editions du Sous-sol. She was a resident at the Villa Medici in 2022-2023 and was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Poetry in 2023. In August 2025, during the literary rentrée, Laura Vazquez will publish her second novel, titled Les forces, with Editions du Sous-sol.

Her texts have been translated into Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Arabic and Italian. Alongside her writing, she regularly gives readings in France and around the world (Contemporary Museum of Shanghai in China, Musée d’art contemporain de Genève in Switzerland, Norsk Litteraturfestival in Norway, Festival Voix Vives Tolède in Spain, Fondation Perdu in Amsterdam in Holland, etc.). She co-edits the magazine Muscle with Roxana Hashemi. She also runs writing workshops and masterclasses.

Find out more on lauralisavazquez.com and @lauralisavazquez

Naomi Maury was born in Bédarieux in 1991. She studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Annecy Alpes and then had a studio at ADERA Décines in Lyon. In 2019, she will be in residence in Thailand with the support of the Institut Français and the French Embassy. She then exhibited for the Lyon Biennial at the Institut d’art contemporain de Villeurbanne. At the end of 2020, she is in residence in Iceland thanks to the Artists in Residence program, the French Embassy in Iceland and Nylo Museum. Following this residency, she exhibited at L’Assaut de la menuiserie (Saint-Etienne) for her first solo show. She was recently awarded the “Amis du musée des Abattoirs” prize in Toulouse, where she exhibited a performance-activated environment. In 2022, she is in residence at CEMES, CNRS in Toulouse with researchers in physics and chemistry on matter, where she will be exhibiting in September. In the same year, she will be exhibiting with Damien Fragnon at Mécènes du Sud Montpellier. She lives and works in Sète.

Naomi Maury’s immersive sensory environments interconnect elements of various kinds, and conjure up the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and living organism that overcomes the rigid boundaries between living and non-living, and advocates a cooperative, non-discriminatory multi-species coexistence.