Winners 2023:

4-week creative residency at the WindsoR Hotel between January 2 and February 28, 2024 or 2025, with a prize of 2,000 euros.
Restitution during a future edition of the festival. With the support of FixCity.

1st Prize: Melisa Yagmur Saydi
Demande à la poussière, 2023

Jury’s favorite: Arnaud Biais
Promenade autour de ma tête, 2023

Artists selected:

Arnaud BIAIS

Louis DAVID

Dazzled Project

Roméo DINI

Juliette GADENNE

Abderrahim « Rouji » KEBBAB

Dosoung KIM

Lou LE FORBAN

Guilherme MARQUES

Simon PASTOORS

Jeanne ROCHER

Sébastien SCHNYDER

Melisa YAGMUR SAYDI

Jury members:

JURY PRESIDENT: Marta Gili, independent curator
Stephanie Airaud, Director, Mac de Marseille
Anne-Sophie Dinant, independent curator
Marc Donnadieu, independent curator
Muriel Enjalran, Director, Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain
Raphaëlle Stopin, director, Centre photographique de Rouen
Matthieu Vabre, co-director and artistic director of Biennales Chroniques Marseille

This year, the prestigious West End Hotel on the Promenade des Anglais is once again hosting the Prix OVNi Sud Emergence, a selection of artists under 39 years of age living in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

The aim: to promote and showcase the region’s emerging artists by offering encounters with professionals and local, national and international artists.

The Prize: supported by a patron to the tune of 2,000 euros, accompanied by a residency at the Hôtel WindsoR and an exhibition.

Artists : Arnaud Biais in collaboration with Luc Bertrand 

What will the ruins of ghost trains look like?
Naked, boneless, isolated, here the only links are to be pulled out by the hair.
What remains is augmented, an end-of-stroke movement, a transitional object, as if stuck between what has been produced and what will be produced.
A sort of vandalized library, leaning slightly towards horror cinema where the shadows are as present as the objects themselves.
Here again, a form of adolescence, not quite independent, seeking to express itself with its own language and whose primary aim is recreational without a defined function, ultimately aspiring to contemplative states.

Lives and works in Nice.
Villa Arson graduate.
Resident at La Station (Nice)

110kHz refers to the number of the house in which the artist grew up as well as to the maximum frequency threshold emitted during the feeding buzz of bats : sequence of very close signals allowing to catch a prey. The genesis of the project is to virtually reproduce spaces that he remembers from mental images and memories exclusively, the desire being to reinterpret the materials that are memory and nostalgia. These materials made of memories, dreams, projections but also denials become territories, territories of exploration without beginning nor end, with iterative, obsessive motive. If they are initiated by personal and intimate elements, their implementation, inspired by the denoising diffusion models for generation of images, aims at bringing them closer to a collective apprehension of the memory and the nostalgia. 

“It is the lesson of the bats: to see the face of what makes you suffer, you must make of your pain a necklace which chains pearls of silence to the pearls of your cries. If the cry is perpetual, nothing is visible anymore. “ 

– Wajdi Mouawad, Anima (2012)

Dazzled is a collective installation by Hélène Bellenger, Margot Millet and Valia Russo. The installation questions how social media and new technologies are changing our relationship with the face, self-portraiture and online self-representation.

This immersive installation is the occasion for Romeo Dini to appropriate a series of distorted and impersonal sky images sourced from the internet. He arranges them to create a space that evokes the melancholy of a potentially serene outdoor environment.
Between insomnia and dreaminess, this device projects us to the crossroads between imagination and reality.
It involves the projection of time-lapse videos – selected from YouTube – in a loop through the propellers of fans, with video projectors attached to them.
The fans project air that pairs with images of clouds, but they also rotate, allowing them to project the videos throughout the entire space. The combination of the mechanical movements of the machines, the breath, and the imagery of the sky and clouds all contribute to the creation of a form of poetry that is both absurd and gentle. Between image and movement. It is as if, with a set of available tools, we have attempted in vain to construct a machine capable of creating a sky.
While the sound of the wind fills up the room, much like white noise, the fan’s propellers, through their speed, aim to slice and segment the colors of the projection. They remind us of their numerical nature by creating what resembles an RGB rainbow. This installation—with its light, movement, and cacophony—aims to provide a vivid analysis of the inanimate. It operates on various levels of iconicity, immersing the viewer in a state of wakefulness beyond time.

Born in 1998 in Marseille, Roméo Dini lives and works between Paris and Marseille. Graduated in 2021 from l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) of Paris. In his practice, Roméo Dini examines new spaces within our realities, such as video games and social media. Through the aesthetics and codes specific to the geek, alternative or popular cultures which make up the Internet, he poetically addresses virtual spaces and their compositional elements. Dini attempts to illustrate and give shape to the feelings we may have towards these impalpable spaces. Often brimming with humor, idiosyncrasies and especially melancholy, his work focuses primarily on the disappearance and archiving of the images and spaces that made up the early days of the Internet.

Juliette Gadenne studied at the Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing (ESA Npdc), including her second year at the Beaux-Arts d’Athènes (ASFA), before obtaining her National Art Diploma (DNA). During these 3 years, she worked on video, sound and photographic installations. Most of her work focuses on intimacy and memory. She then entered the Master’s program in documentary creation and production at CREADOC in Angoulême. During this master’s program, she studied the subject of consent and began an autobiographical project. Her graduation film « Je sors les mots en décalé » was selected for the « La première fois » festival in March 2023 and screened several times at Vidéodrome2 in Marseille.
She is now based in Marseille and writing her next film.

Based on diaries and video archives from her last 5 years, Juliette recounts key moments in her life. We drift through fragments of sensations, thoughts, memories and mental images. It is a transition from darkness to light.

Utopian city, vernacular city. Ikósion is a city of poetic geometry and imperfect lines in a constant dialogue with the sea. The architecture of Ikosion is meant to be minimal. The building blocks are stripped of all kinds of ceramics and carpentry to keep only the essentials. Lost objects, items, travel across the city. But also voices and melodies, creating a dialogue between this deconstructed Casbah and a nostalgic, fantasized Mediterranean.

The video shows a video call between my mother and me. My mother gives me a FaceTime tour of the family home. The video starts outside: vegetable garden, garden, ground floor, then inside: living room, kitchen, bathroom. The tour continues in the intimate bedrooms. Contrary to my expectations, many of my traces can be found, even though I’ve never lived in this house. The video questions distance, boundaries, absence and presence. More precisely, it’s about working methodologically to overcome physical or situational obstacles.

At the end of August, a village in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region is hit by an epidemic of dancing plague that plunges humans and animals into a trance-like state.

Lou Le Forban was born in Marseille, she graduated from the Beaux arts de Paris and the Fresnoy. Her work revolves around the fields of video, performance and drawing. She composes the framework of her films like paintings, in an aesthetic of collage conducive to the meeting of different imaginary worlds, ranging from historical facts to vernacular stories. In her works, the playful and marvelous dimension is linked to an often dreamlike, sometimes disturbing comedy. The body is present in its capacity to suggest a moving language.

The legend of the Mistral, the master of the wind, is well-known for its power to drive people crazy, especially in Provence. This powerful breeze from the northwest, described by Nietzsche as « the freest brother of freedom”, has become a true obsession and a source of inspiration.

« Birutas, Mistral » presents an installation with sculptures, a kind of windsock that materializes the invisible presence of the wind, giving them a form, a face, a voice, and movement.

The images of this installation, announcing the arrival of the Mistral, are accompanied by an equally captivating and mesmerizing sound. This hypnotic melody is composed by the wind as it blows and whispers through the sails of the boats.

It’s not unusual to turn on the television when you enter in a hotel room. It gives you a sense of intimacy. You turn on a news channel or a weather report.

Halfway between a television set and the setting for a children’s role-playing game, the video recording device proposed by the artist invites viewers to experience and embody the speech of a popular icon, Catherine Laborde, TF1’s weather girl.
A symbol of an era, reading her speech takes us back to a time when the television screen was the central, unifying object at home.

In the transitory space that is the hotel room, the idea is to borrow a new identity.
The room becomes the paradisiacal landscape into which the spectators are plunged, and the set of a television in which they are the actors.

Simon Pastoors is graduated in 2022 from the Fine Art School in Clermont-Ferrand. Through installation, publishing and digital images, his work plays with the articulation and interrelationship of popular imagery. These include vernacular photographs, TV archives, childhood memories and images of well-being. His work is rooted in the rural and proletarian culture in which he grew up, and discusses the flaws and paradoxes inherent in the construction of masculinity, the fabrication of a virile white body and adolescent fantasies. He questions the factitiousness and power of the iconography that lulls us to sleep.

Lifer Heritage is a set of two channels based on the codes of a TV programme. By playing with the remote control, you can discover the complex daily lives of some of the inhabitants of Second Life (SL), an old metaverse that reached its peak in 2007. The first channel, LiferTV, is a documentary channel. It’s a journey of instrospection and socialisation in the current world of Second Life. A first-person avatar meets characters who, over time, give an impression of the ruins of SL, the environment and the economy governed by a system of capitalism very similar to the real world. 

The second channel, Lifer18+, is also in the form of a Second Life machimina. It’s a night channel, self-managed by a group of escorts (dancers and sex workers). On this channel, the escorts are present on screen, and speak to the viewers at the same time. They run an independent newspaper that reports images and informations about the demonstrations and social protests organised in Second Life.

In this way, the various players in Lifer Heritage tell the story of a virtual community that has come together to defend their freedom as users and preserve their memories.

Enjoy the programme!

Le Bon Marché in Paris, created in 1838, was born just a few years after the botanical greenhouses designed between 1834 and 1836. They replaced the old greenhouses erected on the same site, and marked the beginnings of French metal architecture. Large-scale structures made of glass and steel were used for the entertainment associated with what was then known as progress. This video takes its cue from an analysis of the two conditions of progress at the time, when two places meet one night, linked by their history and the way in which elements are placed in glass cases like collectors. These places develop in parallel, lulled by a slow sound, where the strangeness of the night feeds a dreamlike, timeless form. It’s the latency of these spaces of contemporary contemplation, these specialized spaces with defined functions and schedules, where in the short time of the video, we can see these empty spaces waiting. Plants, like objects sold in stores, are the first form of globalization, the first plant seeds to come from the other side of the world. Seeds were brought back by settlers, then, after plants, came objects. Their relationships are thus similar, both in their conservation structures, in these great steel and glass architectures, and in their historical sources linked to commodification for a form of entertainment, and thus economic.

Born in Geneva in 1990, Schnyder Sébastien initially trained in photography at the CEPV in Vevey, before going on to study ceramic design for four years at the School of Applied Arts in Geneva. He then continued his studies in visual art, graduating from the Villa Arson art school in Nice in 2023. His work has been exhibited in various venues, including the Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil-Jona (2017), the 11th Prix de la jeune création de Saint-Remy( 2021), the EAC les Halles, the KunstMuseum de Thun (2021), the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Neuchâtel and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève (2022).