Alexandre Babel

Percussionist and composer

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Alexandre Babel is a Swiss composer, drummer and percussionist based in Berlin.
He is involved in various contemporary contexts encompassing modern classical music, free improvisation, noise and performance art. His work explores purely acoustic sound and blurs the boundaries between contemporary music and electronic aesthetics, through virtuoso instrumental technique.
Alexandre Babel is the artistic director of the contemporary percussion ensemble Eklekto. He is also the principal percussionist of the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, the drummer of noise-rock unit Sudden Infant, and the co-founder of the performance collective Radial. His compositions have been performed in various venues and festivals, including Oberlin University, the Archipel Festival in Geneva, the Eyedrum Gallery in Atlanta and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has taught at the University of Berlin, the Haute école de musique in Geneva, the University of Melbourne and the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

Photo credit : Martin Baumgartner

Patrick de Rham

Director of Arsenic

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Patrick de Rham (1972) is the director of the contemporary performing arts center Arsenic, in Lausanne, since 2017. Before that, he headed the interdisciplinary emerging arts festival Les Urbaines for during 10 years. He has also created and directed Post Digital Cultures, a symposium dealing with the relationship between contemporary arts and digital media, under mandate from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. He is or has been an expert for art juries and commissions such as the Swiss Dance Days, Corodis, PREMIO, the Irène Raymond Foundation or Pro Helvetia (for its call for interdisciplinary cooperation projects in new media). He was the first president of the Particimedia association, which supervises the art education structure Culturadio among others. Before working in the art field, he worked as sound designer at the Swiss National Radio, from 1995 to 2007.

Photo credit: Maxime Genoud

Latifa Echakhch

Artist

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A Franco-Moroccan conceptual artist based in Martigny (Switzerland), Latifa Echakhch is a graduate of the National School of Arts of Cergy-Pontoise and the National School of Fine Arts in Lyon. She participated in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013. “Her work, between surrealism and conceptualism, questions with economy and precision the importance of symbols and reflects the fragility of modernism,” according to Alfred Pacquement, president of the jury, director of the National Museum of Modern Art (Centre Pompidou). She is represented by the Kamel Mennour gallery in Paris, the Eva Presenhuber gallery in Zurich and the Dvir Gallery gallery in Tel Aviv.

Jean-Paul Felley

Curator, director of ECAV – Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais

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Jean-Paul Felley, an art historian trained at the University of Geneva and a curator, is the Director of the édhéa – the Valais School of Art since, June 2018.
Felley has organized architecture, design and contemporary art exhibitions since 1989. In 1994, he and Olivier Kaeser founded Attitudes, an independent contemporary art association based in Geneva, with Olivier Kaeser. Since its inception, Attitudes has organized exhibitions in Switzerland, Europe, as well as in Latin America and Lebanon.
From 2008 to 2018, Felley co-directed the Centre culturel suisse de Paris, again with Olivier Kaeser.

Photo credit : Pablo Felley

Sabine Himmelsbach

Director of the Haus der elektronischen Künste – HeK, Basel

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Since March 2012, Sabine Himmelsbach is the director of HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), Switzerland’s foremost institution dedicated to digital culture and the new art forms of the information age. After studying art history in Munich, she worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna from 1993–1996 and later became project manager for exhibitions and conferences for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria. In 1999 she became the exhibition director at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. From 2005–2011 she was the artistic director of the Edith-Russ-House for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. Her exhibition projects include “Fast Forward” (2003); “Coolhunters” (2004); “Ecomedia” (2007); “MyWar” (2010) and “Culture(s) of Copy” (2011). In 2011 she curated “gateways. Art and Networked Culture” for the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn as part of the European Capital of Culture Tallinn 2011 program. Her exhibitions at HeK in Basel include “Sensing Place” (2012), “Semiconductor: Let There Be Light” (2013), “Ryoji Ikeda” (2014), “Poetics and Politics of Data” (2015), “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Preabsence” (2016), “unREAL” (2017) and “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Anti-Bodies” (2018). As a writer and lecturer, she is dedicated to topics related to media art and digital culture.

Photo credit : Christian Knoerr

Tamara Jenny-Devrient

Independent project manager, member of the board of the Fondation Françoise Siegfried Meier

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Tamara Jenny-Devrient has worked as a production manager for artistic projects in Switzerland and abroad for many years.
She has collaborated with the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on various projects, before taking on production duties for the Festival Images Vevey for seven years. Over the course of her career, she had developed a particular affinity for and experience in staging the production of monumental installations and events in public spaces.
She currently works as a freelancer and carries out various mandates for cultural institutions in French-speaking Switzerland.

Credit photo : Charles Frôté

Elise Lammer

Curator and critic – Institut Kunst HGK FHNW Basel, HEAD-Genève, SALTS Basel

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Elise Lammer (born in Lausanne, lives and works in Basel and Berlin) began her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona, before obtaining a Master’s degree in curatorial studies from Goldsmiths University in London.
She is a curator at the SALTS space in Basel, and the founder of Kunsthalle Roveredo, an annual artistic residency project in Graubünden. From 2014 to 2016, she was in charge of exhibitions at APRA, the Adrian Piper Foundation, during the preparation of the artist’s retrospective at MoMA. As curator, artist and author, she has participated in exhibitions in many national and international institutions, including the Kunsthaus Glarus, Istituto Svizzero di Roma (Rome); MAMCO (Geneva); Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin); Goethe Institut (Beijing, Hong Kong); South London Gallery (London), Centre culturel suisse (Paris). She is a guest lecturer at the HEAD-Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design, Geneva and at the Institut Kunst-Université des Arts, Basel.
As a critic, she regularly contributes to Spike Magazine, Frieze, l’Officiel Art.

Luc Meier

Director of La Becque

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Born in Vevey, Switzerland, Luc Meier studied international relations in Geneva. He then spent over ten years abroad, working on cultural projects in Japan and in the United States. From 2008 to 2012, he developed swissnex San Francisco’s and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia’s common art and technology program and directed it out of San Francisco.

Upon his return to Switzerland in 2013, he coordinated the curatorial development of ArtLab at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and was its director of programs until June 2018. A programmatic and architectural initiative, ArtLab brings together art, science and technology in an exhibition infrastructure designed with architect Kengo Kuma.
Since August 2018, Luc Meier is the director of La Becque | Artist Residency.

Stefano Stoll

Director of Festival Images Vevey

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Stefano Stoll is the director of the Festival Images in Vevey, Switzerland. Since 2008 he has specialized this biennial of visual arts in monumental outdoor installations. Every two years it proposes photographic projects made to measure in the streets, parks, the lake and on the façades but also in the city’s museums and galleries, by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Christian Marclay, Hans-Peter Feldman, Paul Fusco, René Burri, Lee Friedländer, Alex Prager, JR, Martin Parr and Alec Soth. In this context, he also manages an “off space” dedicated to contemporary photography (Espace Images Vevey) as well as the Grand Prix Images Vevey, one of the oldest photographic production grants in Europe. During his studies, he participated in the early days of the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography as its co-director from 1998 to 2002. He then joined the artistic direction of the Swiss National Exhibition EXPO.02 before taking over the cultural affairs department of the city of Vevey until 2015. He is regularly invited as a member of international juries such as the Paul Huf Award (Amsterdam), which he chaired in 2014. As an author, he is a member of AICA Press and writes on cultural policy, art and photography.

Haseeb Ahmed (US, 1985)

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Haseeb Ahmed is a research-based artist. Originally from the US, he now lives and works in Brussels. He produces objects, site-specific installations, films, and writes for various publications. Often working collaboratively Haseeb integrates methodologies from the hard sciences into his art production. Currently he works with the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) in Brussels to create the Wind Egg Trilogy. The project blends art and aeronautics, myth and technology, to create new narratives for the present.

Ahmed lectures at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, Sint Lukas Antwerp School of Art and Design, and the Zurich University of the Arts. He is currently a research fellow at the Basis for Art and Knowledge (BAK) in Utrecht (NL) and was an artist in residence at the Brain and Emotion Laboratory at the University of Maastricht (NL) in 2017-2018, supported by the EU Commission’s Science Technology and Arts Initiative (STARTS).

www.haseebahmed.com

Nora Berman (US, 1990)

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In an artistic practice which spans installation, painting, and performance, Nora Berman creates systems that facilitate energetic exchange between the viewer and the artist.  She is interested in creating environments and experiences for transcendence. Using the practice of art to reach towards and senses her identity in the metaphysical world and to better understand her place in the physical world, as a human, an artist, and a spiritual seeker. The holder of a BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA from the Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Berman has exhibited and performed in several solo or group exhibitions around the world. In 2018, she exhibited and performed her Master project A Becoming A Master of Ugly/Sexy (the Draedalix Experience) at the group show Atlas of Heaven at the Kunsthaus Baselland. Her serie of paintings Power Success Magic Dream was shown at the Downs & Ross Gallery in New York in 2017.

www.noraberman.com

Photo credit: Flavio Karrer

Rashayla Marie Brown (US, 1982)

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Lauded as Newcity Magazine’s 2018 Artist of the Moment, artist-scholar Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) manages a living studio practice through photography, performance, voice acting, writing, installation, and video. Exploring emotional vulnerability and self-mastery at the intersections of art history, religion, and popular culture, RMB’s work often uses the voice and the image to engage a code of ethics beyond mere representation. A lifelong nomad who has moved 24 times, she began her artistic practice as a poet in London, England and as a founder of the graphic design company, Selah Vibe, Inc. in Atlanta, USA. From 2013 to 2017, RMB served as the inaugural Director of Diversity and Inclusion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), using everyday performance to invert power dynamics in the art world at large.

www.rmbstudios.com

Photo credit: Nathan Keay

Gil Delindro (PT, 1989)

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Gil Delindro is a Portuguese sound and media artist, based in Berlin. He has distinguished himself with his research on organic elements, ephemeral events and intangible processes in nature. His trans-disciplinary practice is based upon film, installation, sound performance and site specific field research, investigating themes such as bioacoustics, animism, decay, ephemerality and geology.

His work has been presented worldwide, with support and commissions emanating from the likes of the European-wide sound art platform SHAPE, the festivals MusikProtokoll (Graz), Novas Frequências (Rio de Janeiro), Ars Electronica (Linz) , Semibreve (Braga) and CTM Club Transmediale (Berlin), among others.

www.delindro.com

Photo credit : Mizuki Kin

Mbaye Diop (SN, 1981)

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Mbaye Diop (Ndombo al) is a visual artist who lives and works in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Since graduating from the Dakar School of Arts in 2010, he pursues work exploring scenes from his daily life through silk screen printing, painting, performance and video. He regularly exhibits his work in Senegal and collaborates with both international artists in residence in Senegal as well as with local artists, along with running his own art space in Saint-Louis since 2018.

Influenced by the notion of accumulation and overload of information, Mbaye Diop reduces to abstraction the images he takes with his mobile phone by giving them a strong contrast in black and white, then makes them into paintings or silkscreens that he multiplies. Most of Mbaye Diop’s productions are large formats (particularly murals), punctuated by forms that become unreadable and almost abstract at close range but acquire a new figurative strength at a distance.

Elise Eeraerts (BE, 1986)

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Elise Eeraerts is a multidisciplinary artist working with monumental, abstract sculptures concentrating on spatial interventions. In addition, she also creates works representing perceptions of reality through small objects of 2-D media and time-based media works. Eeraerts’ work deals with perception and questions what we see around us. She uses her own visual language, adapted to specific histories, situations, and spatial contexts. Though often site-specific, and relating to architecture, the geometries that occur in her work, aim to establish a contrast to the standard of objects and spaces, questioning their supposed function.

Elise Eeraerts has completed her studies at the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin with Olafur Eliasson and Luca School of Arts in Brussels. She has exhibited in Antwerp (Extra City), Basel (Ausstellungsraum Klingental), Rome (Villa Massimo), Japan (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), Leuven (Museum M), Iceland (Reykjavik Art Museum), Paris (Cité des Arts), Mexico (ZonaMaco) and Berlin (Neue Nationalgalerie & Hamburger Bahnhof). In 2015 she was a resident at Thread in Senegal (Josef and Anni Albers Foundation), in 2016-2017 at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid and in 2018 at Atelier Calder in France (Calder Foundation).

www.elise-eeraerts.be

Joan Heemskerk (NL, 1968)

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Together with Dirk Paesmans, Joan Heemskerk is a member of the art collective JODI (or jodi.org) – active since 1995, the duo count among the pioneers of net.art. Based in The Netherlands, JODI were among the first artists to investigate and subvert conventions of the Internet, of computer programs, and of video and computer games. They radically disrupted the very language of these systems, challenging their visual aesthetics, interface elements, their commands, errors and code. JODI stages extreme digital interventions that destabilize the relationship between computer technology and its users by subverting our expectations about the functionalities and conventions of the systems that we depend upon every day. Their work uses the widest possible variety of media and techniques, from installations, software and websites to performances and exhibitions.

www.jodi.org

Duy Hoàng (US, 1989)

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Duy Hoàng is an interdisciplinary artist born in Vietnam and currently residing in New York City. He received a BFA from UMass Lowell in 2013 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2017. Hoàng accumulates found natural materials and objects, technology processes, drawings, videos, prints, photos, etc., to form site-responsive installations that depict the desire for attentiveness in our immediate surroundings and making connections to the greater environment.

Hoàng has exhibited at Project Space 2025 in Hamburg, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Serbia; LASALLE College in Singapore; Mildred Complex(ity) in New York for a collaboration with J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion; Thomas Erben Gallery in New York; Lorber Family Gallery in Israel; etc. Hoàng had participated in residencies such as A-Z West, Tropical Lab Singapore, Mildred’s Lane, Studios at Mass MoCA, Rabbit Island Residency and more. Hoàng received the Wave Hill’s New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship, and will take part in the LabVerde residency in Brazil come next summer.

www.duy-h.com

Klima Magazine (FR)

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Klima is a bilingual (French-English) biannual printed magazine aiming to bring together the worlds of research and artistic creation. Founded in 2017, it was born from a will to generate a collective dynamic and create thought-provoking content out of transdisciplinary topics that invite input from contemporary scientific research, arts and critical writing.

Klima’s core editorial committee (Loucia Carlier, Valentine Etiévant, Grégoria Lagourgue, Antonine Scali) and its art direction team (Clément Gicquel, Eliott Grunewald, Thomas Le Provost) aim to investigate contemporary cultural issues and new forms of utopia by taking art and research as primary spaces for debate. After examining the political and ideological implications of science fiction in its first issue, Klima will dedicate its second volume to nature and technology intersections – the research and publishing process will partly take place in situ at La Becque and involve collaborations with our other residents.

www.klima-magazine.com

Paula Cermeño León (PE, 1989)

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Paula Cermeño León was born in Lima, Peru and grew up between the United States and Mexico. She did her BA in Industrial Design at PUCP in Lima, Peru with a year-long exchange at the ESAD of Saint-Étienne. In 2017, she obtained her master’s degree in Product Design at ECAL, doing personal projects and client projects for companies such as Vitra, Victorinox, and e15. Biodiversity and our relationship with plants is the starting point for many of her Master projects, where she learned to combine the tools of industrial design with the knowledge of nature. She is currently a Professor and the Head of Industrial Design in the Art and Design Faculty at PUCP in Lima.

www.paulacermenoleon.com

Anthony Pateras (AU, 1979) 

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Anthony Pateras is an Australian composer/performer whose current work focuses on electro-acoustic orchestration, temporal hallucination and sound phenomena. Pateras has written over 75 concert works, having received performances from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Australian Chamber Orchestra and BBC Symphony, commissions from the GRM, Slagwerk Den Haag and Südwestrundfunk Baden-Baden, residencies from ZKM, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and fellowships from the Ian Potter and Sydney Myer Foundations. He has released over 40 albums including collaborations with Mike Patton, Stephen O’Malley and eRikm, as well as working in film with animator Pia Borg, producer François Tétaz and literary critic Sylvère Lotringer.

www.anthonypateras.com

Quadrature (DE)

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Quadrature is an artist collective based in Berlin. Their artistic explorations gravitate towards scientific interests and physical experiments, using new technologies and academic research both as an inspiration and as raw material. For quite some years now, Quadrature’s work has focused on the methods and tools  developed to explore the cosmos. To the artists, the universe is an intangible but very real space of investigation, one that evokes both the most elementary emotions in man and the most advanced scientific theories.

Quadrature works across genres in the context of new media art, their works including audiovisual performances as well as sculptural installations and graphics. Its members Juliane Götz, Sebastian Neitsch and formerly Jan Bernstein (until 2016) have received several awards and scholarships for their artistic work, including honorary mentions from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2015 and 2018, jury selections from the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2017 and 2018, as well as scholarships from Kunstfond Bonn and Akademie Schloss Solitude.

www.quadrature.co

Elise Rasmussen (CA, 1977)

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Elise Rasmussen is a research-based artist working in photography, video and performance. She assumes the role of artist as investigator to uncover lesser-known histories in an attempt to challenge the hegemonic record from a feminist perspective.

Elise has exhibited, performed and screened her work internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Pioneer Works (NY), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. and took part in several residency programs over the last few years. Elise was recently awarded the 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship and the Gattuso Prize from the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto, and has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts and the American Austrian Foundation.

www.eliserasmussen.com

Les Sirènes (FR/CH)

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Les Sirènes is a proteiform collective working on a social critique of sound. Its members analyze and question the auditory myths that contribute to our identity, the forms of domination as well as of resistance that can be shaped through sound – and how sound can produce or destroy the common good.

Using both artistic and theoretical tools, Les Sirènes aim to create listening experiences that are both place-specific and critically distant. At La Becque, the collective will bring together musician and performer Francisco Meirino, composer and improviser Jérôme Noetinger, artist and academic Mathieu Saladin, and researcher and writer Juliette Volcler.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen (DK, 1987)

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Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist based in New York. He is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. To make his work, Steensen ventures on intense photographic excursions and then converts the collected material into digital worlds with 3D scanners, photogrammetry, satellite data and computer game software. Inspired by ecology-oriented science-fiction and conversations with biologists and ethnographers, his projects are ultimately virtual simulations populated by mythical beings existing in radical ecological scenarios.

Kudsk Steensen has recently exhibited internationally at the 5th Trondheim Biennale for Art and Technology, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Serpentine Galleries Marathon, Jepson Center for the Arts, Time Square Midnight Moment, MAXXI Rome, FRIEZE London, Podium, and Ok Corral. His work has been featured in MOUSSE Magazine, artnet News, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Politiken, Information, VICE, and the New York Times, among other publications. 

He is currently a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, and he has received awards from the Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, and the Lumen Arts Prize. In addition to several residency stints in recent years, Steensen is an alumni of NEW INC, a technology and culture incubator by The NEW MUSEUM, in NYC.

www.jakobsteensen.com

COINCIDENCIA Swiss & South American Cultural Exchanges, is a program initiated and organized by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council.

This partnership with La Becque aims to offer two three-month residencies to artists living in South America. The residency is open to all artistic disciplines, as long as the project developed at La Becque proposes a strong link with the notions of nature, territory and/or technology.  

More information regarding the partnership and the program on www.coincidencia.net

La Becque has launched its partnership with ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne in early 2019. The first joint venture between La Becque and an art and design school, the ECAL x La Becque initiative aims at fostering research projects and promoting excellence in art and design education.

We started the collaboration in February 2019 with the residency of Mitch Paone, partner and creative director at renowned Brooklyn-based creative design agency DIA Studio, we are pleased to announce the next two Residents ECAL at La Becque. They will both have the opportunity to conduct a personal project at La Becque while guest lecturing at ECAL over the course of a semester.

Mario de Vega, sound artist from Mexico City currently based in Berlin, will be the second ECAL Resident at La Becque, from October 2019 to February 2020. Sonority, presence and invisibility are the starting points of his artistic work and research. He will teach in the BA and MA Fine Arts as well as in the BA Media & Interaction Design.

Simone C. Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam, will then join us from February to July 2020. Her practice Technofleshinvestigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance. She will teach in the MA Photography and BA Media & Interaction Design, as well as participate in the research project Automated Photography.