The Collège de France welcomes for the first time an artist in residence. French photographer Mathieu Pernot, whose superb series Les Gorgan 1995 – 2015 was exhibited last summer at the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, will have the chance to work inside the Collège de France.
The Collège de France is a major institution in the French intellectual and academic scene. As a major public institution of higher education and research, it offers free courses, open to all, taught by emeritus professors. In 2005, the Collège de France opened its first Chair in Artistic Creation. Since then, many artists such as the writer Alain Mabanckou, the composer Philippe Manoury, the artist Anselm Kiefer or the architect Christian de Portzamparc have given classes.
Words from the College de France, this residence is “a new experience. Mathieu Pernot’s choice is justified by an artistic proposal that makes migratory issues think otherwise. It is therefore a question of linking photographic experimentation and teaching, in the pure tradition of an institution whose mission is to teach current research, all research and to all audiences. ”
Since his project Cahiers Afghans, exhibited in 2016 at the National Museum of the History of Immigration, echoing the colloquium Migrations, Refugees, Exiles of the College de France, Mathieu Pernot has established an accomplice relationship with the institution. His residence will be in the foyer of the building located Place Marcelin Berthelot, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, in a room designed as a laboratory and a workshop. He will also run a writing workshop for migrants and refugees organized by the association French Langue d’accueil.
Previously, Mathieu Pernot had already worked on migration issues. In 1999, he won the Villa Medici scholarship for his work on Roma in Romania. In 2014, the exhibition La Traversée took twenty years of photographic work on these different issues at the Jeu de Paume.
