Naomi Maury

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.

During her residency at Villa Medici, she will be researching the protection of gladiatorial armor, the care of damaged, atrophied, restricted and extinct human and non-human species of antiquity. In particular, the figure of Valeria Lucunda, one of the few female gladiators. Her project entitled “Les cyborgs de l’Antiquité” (Cyborgs of Antiquity) will enable her to seize the past to reinvent other possibilities, leaving room for care and vital inter-species interdependence. In order to create new exoskeleton sculptures and symbiosis designs for a future film.