The fish in a small aquarium, which usually lull children’s dreams to sleep, parade slowly along with prison ships carrying convicts. Together, they form the colorful backdrop of a set. Superimposed on the projection is a shadow play of everyday objects and marine elements. These shadows move, creating the illusion of a dreamlike, little-known island. Is it Treasure Island or Devil’s Island? Is it a place to rest after a well-earned retirement, or a figment of a bleak future? So many tales are being told, it’s up to you to see what’s behind the scenes.

Born in 1992, lives and works in Nice

Mouna Bakouli has developed a protean body of work involving painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Informed by the social sciences, her artistic practice is in direct contact with reality. The artist, well versed in wordplay, creates works with deliberately mocking titles (Projet de retraite: L’horizon de la misère) that question the multiple effects of contemporary society on the human body. Her use of everyday objects and materials deliberately endows her sculptures and installations with an aesthetic of the discarded. 

As Ben’s friend and publisher, I had published some fifteen of his books on art, poetry and ethnicity. Last year, in July, following the “On est tous fous” exhibition, I had the idea of interviewing him. Two meetings took place, the first at the Musée d’Art Naïf, the second on his sunny terrace at the “Maioun de l’artista” with Annie.
We agreed that the film resulting from these interviews, supplemented by footage of his early performances and his paintings and poetry from all eras, should be shown on June 21 at the Cessole…
In the film, Ben talks about his beginnings and takes stock of his career, explaining that he had “put too much emphasis on art” to the detriment of philosophy or science, but that he was nonetheless: “on the verge of being happy”.
Without really planning it, at one point I turned my camera to Annie to ask her if it was difficult to be Ben’s wife. A moving, intense and intimate exchange followed…

Alain Amiel

Benjamin Vautier, known as Ben, was born in Naples in 1935 to an Irish mother and a Swiss father. His family moved to Nice in 1949. After short studies and a job as an errand boy at Le Nain Bleu, he set up a boutique-gallery near the Nice art school, where he sold records and all kinds of objects.
The “Ben doute de tout” (Ben doubts everything) gallery, with its facade covered in objects and writings, now reconstructed in the Centre Pompidou, became a meeting place for Nice’s artistic avant-garde. He rubbed shoulders with Yves Klein, Arman, Raysse and others, joined the American avant-garde movement Fluxus, staged his first performances and organized numerous events.
His hyperactivity, oratorical talent and white writing on a black background have made him famous, and his works are now exhibited in the world’s leading museums.

The wedding sheet foreshadows the destiny of young girls, maidens, by prefiguring their bodies, by marking their entry into social life, as wives and future mothers.

However, instead of viewing this sheet as an ancient symbol traditionally expressing feminine purity, I choose here to set it free. I deconstruct it by evoking an archaic « ceremonial » custom, spread in certain regions of the world and up to a fairly distant past, aimed at both « proving » and « celebrating » the virginity of the bride on her wedding night, although such a practice – fortunately disappeared today – has been devoid of any religious or cultural justification.

In this audiovisual work, the fabric unfolds at the window. It flows and undulates, liquid and changing. The rigidity and austerity of the concrete of the wall cannot constrain it. Similarly, the red of the road sign cannot subdue the blue that escapes in stars. These are intimately linked to the blue of the sky, itself speckled with the white of the clouds.

Indeed, I introduce movement into a world that was meant to be permanently locked on the submission of women.

The song of the F’kiret (urban women’s orchestra) heard in the background evokes the story of the abandoned lover. The beloved body is described herein: the neck, the hair spread over the shoulders… Is the stridency of the yuyu cries a sign of joy or defiance?

Samta Benyahia

Paris 2024

The F’kiret, whose song is featured into the video, is an orchestra of women who sing for women, interpreting the lyrics according to their history and their emotional state. The song adopts an increasingly faster rhythm that invites dancing while describing the beauty and splendor of women.

Samta Benyahia was born in Constantine, Algeria. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the University of Paris VIII and the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Algiers where she also taught.

The artist recently participated in the exhibition entitled « Présences Arabes: Art moderne et décolonisation, Paris 1908-1988 at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

She is the Winner of the 2023 Matsutani Prize

She exhibited her artwork, among many other venues, at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, Art in General in New York, Mahrem Santral Istanbul, Art Sawa Dubai and Qatar. She also participated in various events around the world such as the Venice Biennale and the Bamako Biennale, Dak’Art, the Force de l’Art (at the Grand Palais in Paris), the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the Shenzhen Biennale in China.

She is currently taking part in the exhibition  l’esprit du geste at The Institut des Cultures d’Islam (ICI) curated by Sonia Recasens.

I always do what I say I’m going to do
Robert Barry, point by point

“He wandered among stars accumulated with the density of treasure, in a world where nothing else, absolutely nothing else but he, Fabien, and his comrade, were alive. They were like the thieves of fabulous cities, walled up in a treasure chamber from which they could never leave. Among icy gems, they wander, infinitely rich, but doomed.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I’ve always worked with quantity… the suggestion of extended space in my paintings, the pieces on inert gases (“from measured volume to indefinite expansion”), the half-lives with the pieces on radiation, the pieces on radio waves, and so on. The idea of time, space, infinity, quantity beyond our ability to perceive or understand has always interested me. Even among art lovers, in a perhaps more subtle way. I think it’s still present in my work.
Robert Barry

Time and space are the primary indicators of reality. Even if they are not the most palpable ingredients, they are the abscissa and ordinate on which reality occurs… or doesn’t. “In a time long past, there lived in a lonely, uncultivated forest on the Fulda estate 4”… So begins the tale
by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale Ignaz Denner. To name but one. For, in the face of the question that will interest us most here, it matters little what happens next. The stage is set and, for a start, the knowledge that the story takes place in an indeterminate past is enough for the reader. It doesn’t matter what the setting or the era is, as long as it’s stated, it’s the implausibility of the facts and the verisimilitude of their sequence that will win over the fan of fantastic tales. Here he is, embarked on a fantasy and assured of the solidity of the craft. The bare minimum is assured. After all, it is first and foremost under the auspices of time and space that reality manifests itself, or that fiction builds on its example.

the experience of two points twenty centimetres apart simultaneously – even if you have to squint or move back very slightly! It’s a little more difficult for time, because two events twenty minutes apart can never be apprehended concurrently without memory getting involved in the operation – yet memory doesn’t allow us to squint at these two events and bring them together to consider them with the same comparative rigor; the approximation it brings about is artificial: memory doesn’t squint, it is squinting!

Three years elapsed between the moment Robert Barry conceived the idea of materializing the quantity, abs- tracted by its enormity, that lies behind the number 1,000,000,000, and the realization of this project in the form of a book in twenty-five volumes published in a single copy bearing the title One Billion Dots in 1971. Gian Enzo Sperone, the young Italian gallery owner and publisher who took up the challenge, was no novice. He already has a solid relationship with the artist and with the most adventurous, demanding and (it might as well be said) least saleable aspects of the so-called conceptual art scene. Two solo exhibitions have already been devoted to Barry at the Turin gallery, and his first artist’s book was published in 1970 on Sperone’s initiative.

Evening primrose petals that have wrinkled the paper on which they have dried seem to float on water. They give their name to this slideshow, which contains many other photos taken by the artist – landscape views, studio scenes, exhibition visits, glances at sculptures or her own work – as well as borrowings from other photographers and film stills. It’s a kind of journey into Cécile Bart’s visual universe, where her taste for nature, cinema and photography shines through, and where her favorite artists sometimes appear, a journey in which she knows how to capture ephemeral situations and details with the play of color and light. This is the work of a painter first and foremost, and there’s no name dropping in her quotations, even if you may recognize in passing an image from Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice, or Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents.

Cécile Bart lives and works in Burgundy.
Her paintings/screens (created in 1986) have been shown in numerous French and foreign institutions. (In Nice, for example, she held solo exhibitions at the Villa Arson in 1994 and at the Musée Chagall in 2021.) His paintings/collages are made using the same technique (painted Tergal wiped clean to maintain transparency). On the ceiling of Room 77, the partial superimposition of freely arranged samples produces new colors.
Cécile Bart is represented by Galerie Catherine Issert (Saint-Paul-de-Vence) and Q/G Gallery (Brussels).

ÆQUO consists in creating a dialogue between the Alpine glaciers and the underwater reliefs of the Mediterranean Sea.
Mediterranean Sea through an interplay of complementarities and reversals between the source of the river and the sea where it flows. From an oceanographic fleet, geologists penetrate the heart of the oceans’ geological memory by sending sound waves into the water, generating digital underwater landscapes. Thousands of kilometers away, Alpine glaciers drip. Alpine horn sounds vibrate the snow-capped mountains. As the voices of geologists content morphogenesis, ice melts, salt crumbles in their hands.

To give substance to the scientific data, the sound shapes extracted from the geology software are printed in 3d, in salt and ice. The idea is to explore the creation of forms generated by scientific tools for artistic purposes. These complementary forms are destined to metamorphose and disappear on contact with each other: becoming ocean and becoming glacier are intimately intertwined. This ephemeral sculptural gesture, like a tool for new hypotheses, materializes a world in transition. These forms attempt to freeze time for as long as they can, in the context of a climatic emergency, where the machine is both a vector of vision and of loss.

Julia Borderie & Eloïse Le Gallo have formed a duo since 2016. In an exploratory mode, they explore water as a substance that influences the territories it bathes and the bodies that live in them. In a poetic documentary approach, the camera’s eye acts as a catalyst for encounters, while questioning the human gestures that shape materials and territories. At the heart of a network of viewpoints and disciplines, at the crossroads of sculpture and cinema, they are interested in the origins of materials in the landscape, questioning the complementarities between learned form and sensitive form, in collaborations with scientists around forms generated by their cutting-edge technological tools.

In France’s most heavily-covered city, I entrust visitors with a CCTV camera. Bringing a camera down from its usual pylon and placing it on a pedestal to expose the noises of its motor, its jerky movements, its sharp gaze settling on every detail.
From this encounter with a camera I create the game of a video-visit to an exhibition in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel, zapping from shot to shot as the viewer traverses the space, entrusting the camera with the task of looking, with the comfort of a digital remote control as his guide.
Enter or escape its gaze by capturing its blind spots.

Maxime Chkoulanov was born in France in 2000 to a Russian father and Ukrainian mother. He lives and works in Paris. He received his DNSEP in Nice at the Villa Arson in 2023. A keen DIY enthusiast, he has articulated his constant small-scale creative gestures to form a language dealing with the subjects that run through him.
Maxime is 1.93 m tall and a rock-climber. He has a special relationship with space, and likes to use it to place his audience in front of his works and their scale.
He loves the poetry of a clear idea and the penetration of a sharp joke.

“Mer intérieure” is an introspective journey and a reflection on perception, where we follow Jamila and Robert, a couple of visually impaired high-level athletes, on a sailing trip on their sailboat. The film explores their unique sailing experience.
The color grading, oscillating between blue and red, creates a visual language that departs from the usual conventions. This choice establishes a dialogue between image and emotion, evoking their inner resonances.
The soundtrack, composed by Meryll Ampe, combines sounds recorded at sea with repetitive music. This color and sound treatment creates a hypnotic atmosphere that accompanies the viewer throughout this inner journey, inviting them to feel and reflect on the nuances of perception at sea.

As in the 1st edition, the Espace de l’Art Concret (eac.) – a contemporary art center of national interest – was invited to present a video program in the “Gottfried Honegger” room of the WindsoR hotel.

Artist invited by eac. Ange LECCIA.

A cross between experimental cinema, installation and video, Leccia’s images combine portraits, landscapes and stories, often drawing their motifs from nature and capturing moments where intimacy and intensity create a particularly sensitive visual texture. Purity and abstraction become the vectors of a vibrant approach conducive to contemplation. His work proposes a carnal analysis of the image, where light and natural elements affirm the energy of creation (source: Jousse-entreprise | Art contemporain, Paris).

Ange Leccia presents two videos, two moments suspended in time, “Éblouissement” and “Les Bains Douches”. The artist chooses to update his memory by working with images from his personal archives, which he shot in a New York nightclub in 1986. The two works, in the bluish tones of night, flirt with abstraction by focusing on light, a “life force” for the artist. “Éblouissement” turns towards the beam of a spotlight, and ‘Les Bains Douches’ features the hypnotic light floor of a club. These images of everyday life, slowed down and looped, confront us with the comings and goings of memory, moving us into an elsewhere, a dream where the characters are mere shadows, images stolen from time. Ange Leccia enjoins us to contemplate these fleeting moments that have already returned to the flow of life.

Chez les Sudakas is a photographic essay that explores the imagination of everyday life and what constitutes Argentine culture, that Argentinidad born of a complex interweaving of European and Creole heritage. Through scenes of everyday life, the essay captures this dialogue between tradition and modernity, where elements of yesterday and today meet.

“Sudaka” is a derogatory term used in some European countries to describe people from South America. The term often has xenophobic and discriminatory connotations. However, some people from this region have tried to reappropriate the term as a symbol of cultural pride.

My path in the art world began with my training in photography at the Buenos Aires School of Creative Photography. I then had the opportunity to join the international research and creation residency at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie d’Arles. I then completed a Master’s degree at the Villa Arson in Nice, where I graduated with honors. This enabled me to enter the post-graduate cycle at the Pavillon Bosio, where I collaborate with the Centre Scientifique de Monaco on an Art and Science project. At the same time, I’m working on the design and production of scenography for exhibitions, as well as the installation and transportation of works of art.

In these troubled times, when everyone is afraid of everything, and can no longer trust their (n)shadow, nothing and no one can stop Perrin from proving that it’s still possible to be as white as snow. In fact, it’s security, tranquility and eternity he’s offering you.

He’s a new man who nobody knows from this angle because he’s been able to do discreetly what others do crudely. So he’ll be the one who reassures you, who never responds to attacks because he works all day, because his essence is here.

Proud and disinterested, upright and flexible at the same time, merchant and militant, bohemian and businessman, credible and yet incredible, cordless telephone and luxury craftsman, Perrin knows how to bring people together, around a table or around a work of art, li knows how to bring people together. This is his goal: to satisfy the greatest number of people, in other words, to become a public figure.

A foundation should be dedicated to him for this purpose, such is his tireless work: convincing people every day, so that they finally know that you can be as snow-white on the Mediterranean as you are in Milan, Paris or Miami.

He has published some remarkable works to this end, both in the field of sport (boxing) and in the social sphere (with Starkiller).

Autant de travail, cette expérience, cette faculté de réunir, cette probité et cette connaissance sont à votre service et au service d’un seul slogan qui deja vous convient : Philippe Perrin blanc comme neige !

Au delà de l’homme c’est son œuvre tout entière qui est tournée vers l’immaculé, car c’est bien de cela qu’a besoin notre époque, une personnalite dont le nom est sur toutes les bouches, comme une évidence faite homme; car il est tellement difficile de choisir… Perrin guidera votre main tremblante, l’éclat de sa blancheur pouvant être ce phare qui au loin vous indique le chemin dans la tempête de la confusion, et vous évitera la succion comme seule solution. N’acceptez plus de porter ce poids qui vous écrase, et redressez la tête. Que votre volonté soit raide, et votre honneur rigide et ferme comme a vos plus beaux jours.
Perrins’enchargera, ilsaittellementlefaire.

Michel Sajn

The video I’m showing in the room brings the call of the garden to the window. It features the phoenix palm (Phœnix canariensis), which grew in the garden three floors below, and whose palms occupied the window space. It was this Matissian vision that inspired the creation of the “Phoenix Room”.

Today, this vanished palm tree is back in its place in a video I shot in a cloister garden. Etymologically, a garden is an enclosed space. Here, the lush vegetation surrounding the phoenixes is reflected in the rhythm of the columns that punctuate the slow stroll. I find here all the emotion I feel in front of vegetation, when contained in this way, it proposes a secular dialogue between microcosm and macrocosm.

This installation began during a research residency at the Centre d’Art 3 bis f in Aix-en-Provence in 2017. It is the fruit of a co-production between Le Cinéma de Beaulieu and La Bande Passante, with the invaluable support of Il Était Un Truc… and Romain Trachel (Artificial Intelligence). Modular seating created by Studio Smarin, Les Choses, accompanies the immersive experience of this installation.

“I arrived at the residency wearing these shoes.
They broke quickly.
Down in the inner courtyard, I noticed this space covered with gravel.
Since I was in a former psychiatric internment ward, I figured that the gravel must have been trodden on by someone.
must have been trodden by patients who had stayed there.
But I felt like I was fantasizing.
I filled my shoes with gravel, using it as a yardstick.
I don’t think anyone noticed the missing gravel.
Florian Schönerstedt

ÆQUO consists in creating a dialogue between the Alpine glaciers and the underwater reliefs of the Mediterranean Sea.
Mediterranean Sea through an interplay of complementarities and reversals between the source of the river and the sea where it flows. From an oceanographic fleet, geologists penetrate the heart of the oceans’ geological memory by sending sound waves into the water, generating digital underwater landscapes. Thousands of kilometers away, Alpine glaciers drip. Alpine horn sounds vibrate the snow-capped mountains. As the voices of geologists content morphogenesis, ice melts, salt crumbles in their hands.

To give substance to the scientific data, the sound shapes extracted from the geology software are printed in 3d, in salt and ice. The idea is to explore the creation of forms generated by scientific tools for artistic purposes. These complementary forms are destined to metamorphose and disappear on contact with each other: becoming ocean and becoming glacier are intimately intertwined. This ephemeral sculptural gesture, like a tool for new hypotheses, materializes a world in transition. These forms attempt to freeze time for as long as they can, in the context of a climatic emergency, where the machine is both a vector of vision and of loss.

Julia Borderie & Eloïse Le Gallo have formed a duo since 2016. In an exploratory mode, they explore water as a substance that influences the territories it bathes and the bodies that live in them. In a poetic documentary approach, the camera’s eye acts as a catalyst for encounters, while questioning the human gestures that shape materials and territories. At the heart of a network of viewpoints and disciplines, at the crossroads of sculpture and cinema, they are interested in the origins of materials in the landscape, questioning the complementarities between learned form and sensitive form, in collaborations with scientists around forms generated by their cutting-edge technological tools.

Sit on the bed with your back straight and shoulders relaxed.
Inhale deeply through your nose to the count of four, then exhale slowly through your mouth to the count of four.
Continue this cycle for a few minutes, concentrating on your breathing.
Feel your body relax with each breath.