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.
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Hélène Bertin
Fellow
2023 - 2024
Visual arts
Biography
Hélène Bertin (France, 1989) claims to have a “deliberately bastardized approach” as both artist and researcher. She lives in Cucuron (Vaucluse) and develops her practice by forging links and engaging in working adventures with passionate people, always activating the notion of otherness. Rejecting any disciplinary reading, she approaches gesture and material as strategies for bringing practices together. In her exhibitions, this interweaving of different object typologies and postures creates a collective narrative. In her books, she focuses on marginal personalities to convey parallel stories. For Hélène Bertin, the sensitive relationship between living and working is played out in cooperation between the “realms” of each individual. It was her encounter with the practice of artist Valentine Schlegel that forged this vision of art – to whom she dedicated a bio-monographic book in 2017, radically renewing the gaze on this artist.
Project
At Villa Medici, Hélène Bertin is developing a project devoted to the figure of the wild gatherer, around which three approaches are articulated: collecting the gestures of gatherers in the Roman countryside, participant observation of the Tammurriata – a traditional dance from Campania – as an attempt to liberate gesture, and her own gathering of materials for future sculptures. While wild gathering may once have been associated with a way of life based on the harvesting of readily available natural resources, today it takes on an archaic, unconventional, anarchic dimension and constitutes a stubborn resistance to progress. Gathering can thus be a survival practice, a challenge, like an ultimate game.
At Villa Medici
See the complete programAfter residency
Fellows
2025 - 2026
Medici Residency Occitanie
Application 23.02 - 01.04.2026
Created in 2018 by the Occitanie Region in partnership with the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, the Price Occitanie - Medici dedicated to young contemporary creation aims to develop the international influence of talent from Occitanie by welcoming them to the Villa Medici for a research and creative stay of several months. Each year, the price attracts around a hundred candidates - visual and visual artists - eager to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a residency at one of Europe's most emblematic art centers, in contact with other artists from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. Each year, the winner of the Price Occitanie - Medici is selected on the basis of an application and an audition of the shortlisted candidates, each of whom presents his or her project to a jury made up of representatives of the Region, the Director of Villa Medici and associated experts.