Jury :
Alexandre Babel
Percussionist and composer
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. He is the artistic director of the contemporary percussion ensemble Eklekto. He was also the principal percussionist of the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin from 2010 to 2019, 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.
François J. Bonnet
Composer and theoretician
François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician based in Paris. In addition to being the Director of INA GRM (Institut national de l’audiovisuel / Groupe de Recherches), François J. Bonnet is also the author of several books published in English by Urbanomic. He wrote the manifesto “The Music to Come”, published by Shelter Press in 2020, and the co-edited the “SPECTRES” series of publications, a joint project of INA GRM and Shelter Press. As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger. He has collaborated with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Rabelais, James Rushford or Gisèle Vienne. While his own music has been played in renowned venues and festivals all over the world, François J. Bonnet has been working closely with groundbreaking composer and electronic music pioneer Eliane Radigue, and has been performing regularly her composition in concert.
Patrick de Rham
Director of Arsenic
Patrick de Rham 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.
Stefanie Hessler
Curator, writer, and editor
Curator, writer, and editor, Stefanie Hessler’s work focuses on ecologies and technology from an intersectional feminist perspective. Director of Swiss Institute in New-York since 2022, she was previously Director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, where she has curated solo exhibitions by Jenna Sutela, Diana Policarpo, and Frida Orupabo, as well as the transdisciplinary exhibition Sex Ecologies which focused on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds.n In 2020–21, she served as chief curator for the Seventeenth MOMENTA Biennale, Sensing Nature in Montreal.
Deborah-Joyce Holman
Artist and curator
Deborah-Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist based between London and Basel. Their work has recently been shown in many institutions around the world, including Oregon Contemporary, Portland (2023), Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022), 7th Athens Biennial (2021), La Quadriennale di Roma (2020) and Auto Italia, London (2019), among others.
From 2020 to 2022, she worked at East London arts organisation Auto Italia first as Associate Director. They were the founding director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland, which ran from 2015 to 2020. Deborah-Joyce has curated the 2018 and 2019 annual group exhibitions for the arts and music festival Les Urbaines in Lausanne, presenting newly commissioned works by over 15 international artists.
Tamara Jenny-Devrient
Independent project manager
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. 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.
Elise Lammer
Curator and critic
Elise Lammer (born in Lausanne, CH) is a curator engaged with exhibition making, public programming, archiving, teaching and gardening. Her work is committed to questions related to the role of space (public, domestic) in defining identity construction. Working across media and with a transgenerational and intersectional approach, her work aims to question and re-assess narratives that have suffered from monolithic, one-sided integration within History, while looking at such problematics from a contemporary prism. She is currently a PhD candidate at Institute Art Gender and Nature in Basel, and University Linz, Austria, doing research on the garden of British artist Derek Jarman. Since 2019, she’s been developing a garden in homage to Jarman’s Prospect Cottage at La Becque, where she’s also putting together an archive and artistic programme aimed at raising awareness around Jarman’s legacy. In 2015 she founded the research platform and collective Alpina Huus, a performance-led project and research collective dedicated to investigating the relationship between performance and domestic space. Elise Lammer is currently teaching the MFA Fine Arts Course at Institute Art, Gender, Nature in Basel, where she’s invested in sharing knowledge around counter-hegemonic spaces, histories, and figures.
Boris Magrini
Curator at HeK Basel
Born in Ticino (Switzerland), Boris Magrini studied art history at the University of Geneva and received his PhD from the University of Zurich. Head of Program and curator at HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), Boris Magrini has organized numerous exhibitions that promote transdisciplinary dialogues between artistic practices and sciences, and that address the economic, cultural and political implications of the development of artificial intelligence. Among the exhibitions he has curated are Radical Gaming (HeK, Basel, 2021), Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence (HeK, Basel, 2019), Future Love. Desire and Kinship in Hypernature (HeK, Basel, 2018), Hydra Project (Sonnenstube, Lugano, 2016) or Grounded Visions: Artistic Research into Environmental Issues (ETH, Zürich, 2015-2016). He has also published texts in various publications and his book Confronting the Machine: An Enquiry into the Subversive Drives of Computer-Generated Art (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2017) offers an unconventional perspective on digital art and its relationship to technology and society.
Luc Meier
Director of La Becque
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.
Mai-Thu Perret
Artist
Mai-Thu Perret was born in 1976 in Geneva, where she lives and works. She is known for her multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, painting, video and installation. Perret has created a complex oeuvre which combines radical feminist politics with literary texts, homemade crafts and 20th century avant-garde aesthetics. She studied English at Cambridge University and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2011 she won the Zurich Art Prize, the Prix Culturel Manor and she participated in the 54th Venice Biennale. Her recent solo shows include the MAMCO, Geneva (2019), the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); Le Magasin, Grenoble (2011); Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (2011); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2008) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2006).
Stefano Stoll
Director of Festival Images Vevey
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 Feldmann, Paul Fusco, René Burri, Lee Friedlander, Alex Prager, JR, Martin Parr and Alec Soth. In this context, he also manages the Espace Images Vevey, an “off space” dedicated to contemporary photography, 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.