Open Studios Summer 2022

On the occasion of our traditional Open Studios, we invited you to discover the work of our residents and share their creative processes on Wednesday, July 20.

As part of this summer edition, the public discovered Mineral Rights, a video by Lara Almarcegui in which she questions mining rights and the exploitation of natural resources. In his apartment, Emmanuel Crivelli invited us to participate in contemporary and transversal reflections on media with his ongoing project Is that really the truth? We were then invited by Virginie Laganière and Jean-Maxime Dufresne to see their film The Radiant Mountain and their recent video experiments. Their projects focus on the imaginary of the moutains whose different interpretations leave room for a certain tension between questions of nature and artificiality. Afterwards, we were able to immerse ourselves in the work of Arafa Hamadi, whose project testifies to the exploration of queer spaces in Switzerland. Altar, is an abstraction of several places, cultures and encounters, whose spatial arrangement derived from the study of labyrinths and fractals in East African ornaments and hairstyles. Walking through the workshops, we were able to discover Sound Fossils by Dominique and Tobias Koch, a series of glass sculptures that are physical remnants of La Becque’s acoustic environment. The vibrations and air pressure of these sounds, collected and broadcasted through their online platform terratones.fm, were used as a sculptural generative process. With Suzanne Treister, we discovered two projects, Kabbalistic Futurism and Scientific Dreaming, whose themes intersect mysticism, technology, and science to consider various possible futures. Finally, during our wanderings, we came across the works of Wisrah C.V. da R. Celestino : Tables and Bottom. Starting from the presence of plastic waste in Lake Geneva to reflect on the semiotic divergences of pollution between the Global South and North, the projects can also be understood as a broader ecology that include notions of territoriality, ownership and flux, influencing the artist and their artistic dynamics.

The evening concluded with a live musical performance by Tobias Koch, followed by a listening session with Natasha Anderson, whose project Dirty Ice emerged from her glaciological research and its sonic mediation. The aesthetic consideration of these sublimated, deformed and transposed glacial entities proposes to consider them as political agents.

Thank you so much for your presence!