Casa de Velázquez invites us to discover 5 photographers: Anais Boudot, Maria do Mar Rêgo, Marianne Wasowska, Anna Katharina Scheidegger, and Aurore Valade
Anaïs Boudot
“It is in the footsteps of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross that Anais Boudot followed during her year at the Casa de Velázquez. The figure of a woman walking through the landscapes and her inner journey guided the series La noche oscura, a first set of photographies of places of worship, places of passage and habitation through mystical Spain. In black and white, these architectural elements seem to bathe in an inky night. In this indecision between positif and negative, day and night, Anaïs Boudot approaches the limit of the visible. A second set forms the luminous counterpoint to these nocturnal and mysterious architectures, images gleaned from the sierra represent details of nature, in which stones and vegetal elements become entangled, sometimes until saturation and where the gold color dominates, reaching the status of object, even of icon. This series was presented at ¡Viva Villa! at the Institut Français of Madrid, the Binome Gallery or the Abbaye Saint-Georges de Boscherville.
At the Casa de Velázquez, Anaïs Boudot was able to develop her experimental work in the laboratory and in the studio, transforming digital images into negative, drawing her images on glass or on stone, exploring other interior spaces. Since then, she has been walking around, browsing territories to glean image materials, in the mountains, in the forest, near the water. Recently in residency at Bilbao Arte, her attention was focused on rock formations, true maps of the times. Between a mystical quest and a photographic mission, her approach continues in the laboratory that she transforms into an artist’s studio, a mental space that extends her experiences with the natural elements. She is represented by the Binome Gallery in Paris. ”
Maria do Mar Rêgo
“Since 2007 I have developed different photographic projects, individual and collective. These projects are the result of an ongoing study and life process between Portugal, my country, and my place of residence (2001-2007: Barcelona and Brussels, 2007-2010: Arles and Madrid, 2010-2015: Berlin, 2015-2016: Madrid, 2017-2019: Lisbon and Évora). From my years of training and professional practice, I keep experiences of collaborations and partnerships with actors in the European artistic context who benefit and nourish my work, my life.
Parallel to my artistic works and exhibitions, I have the opportunity to collaborate with other artists, to lead workshops and to give conferences, they are more and more transversal work experiences at the level of the execution as to that of diffusion.
Becoming a member of the artistic section of Casa de Velázquez was a recognition of the importance of the international course that I started more than eighteen years ago. Being able to develop La Traversée project on the shores of Miño, Douro, Tagus and Guadiana was a chance, a source of answers, collaborations and essential reunions that forever changed the way of seeing and executing my work.
Being an artist member of the Casa de Velázquez is a mark in my trajectory, an essential reference for me. First, being an artist in residence, under the conditions offered by Casa de Velázquez, gives us time. We take the time, not only to create, but especially to make mistakes. Experiment, wander and, eventually, find something new.
Then, the Casa allowed me to find a new community of artists, actors of the local artistic context and suppliers. A posteriori, with some I co-produced some of my works. Three years after my stay in Madrid, I still collaborate with artists or scholars in new projects in Spanish and Portuguese territory.
Finally, the artistic residency period was, and remains, an ideal time for presentations and exhibitions, as decisions (form, installation, etc.) must be made.
Putting words on the work you are developing is a powerful vehicle for understanding whether the desire for expression and the resulting image are aligned.
To participate in ¡Viva Villa! in its first edition was the opportunity to know the routes, works and realities of other resident artists in Italy or Japan. The conference cycle – even with a specialized and restricted audience – was very revealing. Personally, to install photographs in a room of the Constitutional Council was a very interesting exercise to accomplish. To keep the base of my analog photography work I had chosen to make a projection with slides in one of the “noble” rooms of the Council, and the piece surprised the visitors who came to discover an institutional and historical building.
Marianne Wasowska
“My photographic work is divided between two aspects: long-term documentary projects, which complement the photographic image with various types of documents (sound, maps, archives) and place a central role in the link with the community in question. , in order to build another way of being an author. Then a research on mental images (memory, dreams) and perception, which looks at how thinking is related to the image and where our sensory experiences shape our construction of the world.
In general, my practice of photography passes by the experience, that it is that of the context being at the origin of the image, or that which I reconstruct in workshop by means of installations. The invisible is at the heart of my concerns, both as a political strategy and as a permanent challenge to representation.
Casa de Velázquez allowed me to explore a part of my work that I had not yet developed – a project on dreams – and gave me the space and the means I needed to experiment with new way of working photography.
Until then I had practiced only a documentary approach, always immersed in reality. Having a workshop and having some isolation allowed me to make room for another type of image, which required a more attentive and introspective listening.
I started traveling alone at 18 years old. I traveled to photograph and learned in one movement what it meant to occupy a place in the world as a woman alone, ie not accompanied by a man. Photographing meant claiming my presence in contexts where I had nothing to do at first.
My practice of photography has always been linked to the way I live my femininity: as a need to go beyond determinism to build a relationship to the world in which I can be free.
When I started my career in art, I really began to wonder about the place of women in this sphere of society, a priori educated. I did not understand how it was possible for art school students to be almost exclusively women when the artists in the market were overwhelmingly men. What had happened in the meantime?
In the same way, my legitimacy as an artist – in general or in relation to an institution that supports me – is for me the subject of constant questioning. Over the residences, I discovered that it was shared, but only by women! As if there was a kind of anxiety, unconscious guilt to occupy a place in this environment, and that we would never stop having to prove ourselves.
Fortunately, the questions of gender are starting to be raised and things are changing – but others, particularly related to the relationship between art and social classes for example, remain in my opinion very little mentioned. ”
Anna Katharina Scheidegger
My photographic work highlights social themes, anchored in the present and the intimate. I try to highlight destinies and complex situations. The invisible human, placed on the sidelines, is at the heart of my work in a style close to documentary. Empathy and sensitivity are key points developed throughout my productions, be they photographic, cinematographic, performative, or three-dimensional.
The value of my stay at Casa de Velázquez is expressed in two words: The luxury of time. The residence gives the necessary conditions for experimentation with the implication of failure, research and recovery. This freedom has led my work to a more personal dimension, even if the subjects treated are at first glance documentary in nature.
The work HEAD OF ROSES, whose research was done at the Casa de Velázquez and which is part of a series of works around the melting glaciers, is an example. In parallel, I developed my main project LA CAÑADA REAL GALIANA – UNA PANORMÁMICA AUSENTE, a kind of “Google Street View”, houses built illegally over 15km. The images of the walls act as an indirect and subtle denunciation of the reality behind them.
A 80m photograph was exhibited in 2016 during the ¡VIVA VILLA! at the Palais Royal in Paris; a very important moment, marked by the meeting and the connection between the different partners and institutions.
That year, three women occupied the seats of artist members in photography. I do not think photography has a genre. No more than sensitivity, strength, or courage, nor talent or determination. Photography is a job. Above all, behind a camera, there is a human being with his/her eye, his/her personality and his/her obsessions, which is manifested in the choice of framing, the treatment of the image and the subject. But when we look at the statistics, we see that the major exhibitions, awards and events (especially financed with public money) are more than 80% devoted to male artists. And we must not only deeply regret all the eyes of the great photographers we miss, but understand the sociological issues that lead us to this fact to finally break the codes of a sexist patriarchy, that most of us firmly denies.
The Swiss legend Arm- Seelen (poor souls) reports that the souls of those who, during their lifetime, behaved badly, are imprisoned in the glaciers after their death. The ice head, the artist’s own molding, contains flowers that – alone – will remain after the thaw.
The ice reflects the ephemerality of life and its disappearance programmed to reveal the flowers and shows that when something fades it is to give way to something else. In an idea of renewal and even here of metamorphosis, the cold of ice and death gives way to flowers, a sign of hope and tenderness.
“What we see in my pictures is death, heads, eyes closed. In spite of all that, there is something that resists; the inside of the head is a symbol of thought, of tenderness, it is a sign of hope. That’s what we have left with: one can have a purely scientific, analytical vision of the world, one does not survive. I think that we humans need a mystery or a hope, a flower in our heads. ”
Aurore Valade
Since my stay at the Casa de Velázquez, I am interested in the artistic space as a place of manifestation where gestures, singularities and ways of inhabiting the world are inscribed. I explore the possibilities of words and images to reconfigure personal and historical representations. I work in a collaborative way, and through each meeting, a process is set up in time to form fragments of memories and stories.
This time of meeting with a territory and its inhabitants was not only in the year of residence at the Casa Velázquez which was primarily a springboard for further research.
For three years now, I have been going back to Madrid regularly, where I have been building long-term relationships.
“Digo yo” is the participative photographic project that I initiated at the Casa de Velázquez and that I continued this year with the association Intermediae of Matadero in Madrid as part of the program “Mirador de Usera”.
I spent six months in contact with women’s groups in Usera, a stigmatized peripheral district. There, were slums, misery and mud. The grandmothers of the neighborhood knew it well, they struggled their feet immersed in slush.
It was not so long ago, at the very end of the 50s. Then began large and spontaneous citizen movements fighting against unworthy housing. In this crossroads of migrations and solidarities with multiple faces have emerged many women, they have always taken a position in the public space. I met these women who make the neighborhood and gave me fragments of their individual and collective resistance.
The photographic image does not enlighten or reconstruct rebellious stories and memories. It comes to present them as an enigma to question in the thickness of time and experiences.
The exhibition “Digo yo” is presented in Madrid, gallery of the Junta Municipal of Usera starting September 20, 2019.
Kujoyama Villa – Why a residency in photography ?
In Japan, the experience of residency is first of all that of the experience of the eye. On a Japan that is deconstructed as we begin to know it, a floating relationship to the landscape and the light is experienced. A residency in photography and Villa Kujoyama, is also put at the center of the projects of the 24 winners photographs hosted since 1992 in the country of the rising sun have a common denominator despite different trajectories.
From Antoine d’Agata to Ornela Vorpsi to scenes from Japanese cities by Pierre Faure, from Xavier Lambours’ gaijins to Lin Delpierre’s Kyoto Triptychs to Julien Guinand and Tadashi Ono’s revealed concrete landscapes, views of the world. before and after residency too. To return again as a winner 15-years latter as Natacha Nisic or be affected by the disaster of March 11, 2011 as Thierry Girard, in a country where visual language predominates, how to translate these photographic signs and sometimes their end. To put on paper the research processes in which the ideas succeed and finally the practice. Feedback on a residency in photography at Villa Kujoyama on the theme of the fourth edition of the ¡Viva Villa! – The end of the forests.
Luc Arasse – 2009 Resident Aménité, 2009
To evoke in a few lines the residence at Villa Kujoyama? First, by far, an idea, a project, words. And up close: a base from which I went several hundred times to walk full time; neighbors too, funny and concentrated, some too rare invitations in the country. Returning incidentally ten years later, I realized how much this residence is a generous, patient place, which offered me a time which does not go away – as one says of the diamond, that it lasts.
Jean Rault – Resident 2002 Lady, a drink in her hand. Kyoto. 2002
Reading the theme proposed for this edition of ¡Viva Villa! The end of the forests, remember the words of my friend Bernard Lamarche-Vadel who disappeared nineteen years ago, in response to a journalist who asked him if the reception of his latest book anguished him “After suffering the Severe judgment of men, I fear another judgment even more formidable still, that of trees; there are books that should not be written, for the sake of the trees …! “.
(Classical) photography and book publishing, be it books of literature or photography books, consume paper and contribute to deforestation. Beyond his sobering humor, our friend who was a perfectionist, and was himself mad about Japan and Japanese literature, encouraged us to go beyond.
Even with his suicide, he expressed this obsession with the perfection that characterizes voluntary death in Japan (Maurice Pinguet, 1984). Let’s keep this exigency when we add our works to those already existing so as not to add to the misfortune of the world with trivia.
Thierry Girard – 1997
“When I arrived at Villa Kujoyama in 1997, I still do not know how much influence this stay would have on my future work. I had in mind the project of retracing “The Road of Tôkaidô” with, in my luggage, an (incomplete) catalog of Hiroshige’s works on the same theme, paradoxically, while my photographic work was gradually stripped down over the years and I favored empty landscapes, austere, sometimes “minimal”, I considered my stay in Japan not as the climax of such an approach but rather as a break, a return to my photographic origins, documentary landscape, street photography etc.
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Marc Denayer – 2000 Tokai-year, 2000
One day I was allowed to visit and photograph the Tokai Zen Garden lost in the middle of the Myoshin-ji temples. The garden of Tokai-an seen in an art book particularly appealed to me: seven stones anchored for centuries in a bed of gravel raked in concentric circles.
The only monk living in the temple had been warned of my arrival. Once unshod despite the icy wind that rushed into the corridors, we arrived in sight of the garden of seven stones, but at the turn of a long platform I was dazzled by another garden. An unknown garden. More ordinary. Was it still a garden? Unfinished, absent, left for dead. Invisible for anyone who would not have been sensitive to its strange message. A white, uniform gravel raked in desperately parallel straight lines. Nothing to hold the attention. No remarkable stone, rock, moss, vegetation, river suggestion, waterfall or ocean … not the slightest inflection either in the pristine gravel. The space of a flash I was facing myself in a benevolent and absolute silence … My host preceding me noticed neither my trouble nor the short pause that I had to mark.
I photographed the seven-stone garden without inspiration – that of the art book – but I will never forget the side garden. That of calm thoughts. Brutal exile from the world that had forced me to look at the bottom of my eyes.
This episode influenced not only all of my work done throughout the stay at the villa Kujoyama but also all my work until today.
Isabelle Le Minh – 2019
For an artist, a residency is a precious moment that offers him/her the incredible luxury of being able to devote fully to his/her creation, being free from any professional obligation.
While applying to Villa Kujoyama, I wanted above all to confront myself with another environment, likely to trigger a new phase in my work. Indeed, my creative process is based on documentary research and borrows elements from different systems of thought or representation to aggregate them in my creations. My ideas are generally born of chance encounters (with a book, an object, a technique …) and resonances or telescoping that arouse these meetings.
Japan, a country culturally very rich and so different from the European countries, was for me the ideal place, especially since the light and the time, which are at the very foundation of photography, are apprehended differently, Either through mythology and poetry – the legend of Amaterasu for example – or in Zen Buddhism – which views time as a succession of transient moments and profoundly marks Japanese society. It was precisely while staying in Kyoto for nearly ten years in the 1960s that the American artist James Lee Byars built up his personality. With the project to walk in his wake, I seeked to discover all the wealth of traditions and crafts, from which I intend to borrow certain elements to develop my works, since the art experimentation and the materiality of the images constitute an issue just as important as the “concept” in my approach to photography. I also rediscovered here the pleasure of shooting in the street full of “curiosities”, despite the overwhelming heat of the summer and the hostility of some local people towards the photographers in Kyoto. Finally, I met an art historian, Shinobu Skagami, who helped me a lot in my research; thanks to his sagacity, we discovered that the house of the poet Lindley Williams Hubbel, where Byars made his first performance entitled “Peace”, was just 50 meters from Villa Kujoyama and that the neighboring house, owned by an American collector destroyed today, was the place of residence of David Bowie during his many stays in Kyoto!
Villa Medicis : why a residency in photography?
The example of Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat, residents of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici 2016 – 2017
Brodbeck & Barbuat form a duet of artists using photography and video. French and German, they have been working together since 2005 in Paris. Residents of the Academy of France in Rome – Villa Medici between 2016 and 2017, they graduated from the National School of Photography.
During their residency at the Villa Medici, Brodbeck & Barbuat participate in several exhibition projects (solo and collective). When presenting previous works, such as IN SEARCH OF ETERNITY – CHAPTER III Mumbai, 2015-2016, the works are always reinterpreted formally and redeployed in order to interact with the historical spaces of Villa Medici, their stories and their memories, but also with the works of other artists around them.
