Les Chichas de la pensée
LES CHICHAS DE LA PENSÉE
Conceived by Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah, in collaboration with Asma Barchiche, Les Chichas de la pensée is a collective cultural program celebrating a new generation of artists and ideas, combining the pleasure of a rediscovered celebration with the urgency of reflection.
Their project at Villa Medici
As part of their residency at Villa Medici, the collective Les Chichas de la pensée will be accompanied by 6 multi-disciplinary artists, with the aim of creating a shared living space, a place of refuge, where they can carry out research, reflect on artistic gestures and explore paths that will enable them to think up a new model for creative and exhibition spaces.
THE GUEST ARTISTS
Marouane Bakhti
Marouane Bakhti was born near Nantes in 1997. He is an author and journalist for Mouvement magazine. Comment sortir du monde, published in March 2023 by Nouvelles éditions du réveil, is his first novel.
CHOUF
A specialized educator since 2014, Chouf initially specialized in the issue of drug addiction and parenthood as part of her research dissertation at the Institut Régional du Travail Social. It wasn’t until 2020, when she took up her position as ES in the Goutte d’or district (Paris), that her work focused on young people from the notorious ZUPs. Her reflections focus on the links between violence, delinquency (specifically in the context of brawls) and emotional and sexual insecurity in these neighborhoods. Chouf is an artist whose work is part of a contemporary poetic tradition of intimacy. Her declamations, accompanied by guitarist Trustfall, form a hybrid between spoken word and sentimental raï. Her writing subtly plays with love and despair, speaking of the living and the dead, of the loneliness of being oneself, of the courage to say things.
Ladji Diaby
“Ladji is an arstist born in 2000, he is the big brother of his five brothers and sisters, of which I am one. He is in an art school; leq Beaux-arts de Paris. He does a lot of sculpture, painting and other things. His works are different from each other and very impressive, but there are several that I find incomprehensible, but that’s not why I don’t find them pretty. Most of his works represent our family and himself. I really like what he does and he’s a very good example for me.” Text written by my little sister Fatoumata Diaby
Alexia Fiasco
Born in 1990, Alexia Fiasco grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis and studied photography at Berlin’s Ostkreuzschule fur Fotografie in 2013. Always committed to issues of social justice and convinced of the power of access to art and culture on this front, she is currently coordinator of the Fauvettes project, a socio-cultural project in a housing estate in the suburbs of Paris. This same commitment influences, among other things, her video-photographic practice, and it is thus between documentary photography and art photography that her work develops. Driven by the desire to recreate post-colonial archives, she explores themes of denial and duality, but above all the importance of the power of representations of post-colonial diasporas. It was with this in mind that she co-founded Filles de Blédards, a collective of artists of all kinds who create spaces for exhibitions, reflection, discussion and celebration around questions of immigration and its representations.
Luna Mahoux
Born in 1996, Luna Mahoux lives between Paris and Brussels. She studied painting at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels and at ENSAPC in Paris-Cergy. In autumn 2023, she began a post-master’s program at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, where she is making her first Film. Although she studied painting, Luna Mahoux has never painted; her working method has always been to interrogate and manipulate images collected on the internet. What is unearthed must be more “real” and “true” than anything that has since been accumulated to construct the present. They aim to make the invisible visible, using poor, low-resolution images as a struggle against capitalist assimilation, and highlight the power of archives, words and forgotten black histories.
Eden Tinto-Collins
Eden Tinto Collins (France/Ghana) was born in 1991 and lives and works between Paris and Brussels. She developed her visual arts practice at the École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris Cergy. A poet and Meta-Trobairitz, she explores notions of networks and interdependence, f•r•ictions between melancholy, mythology, post, trans, cyber and even extra-humanity. ETC’s noetic devices (to connect mind and spirit), in the form of video installations and/or site-specific performances, appeal to interdependence and the collective. Far from being restricted to one medium more than another, she describes her practice as hypermedia.