the artists
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Mathis Benestebe
Mathis Benestebe is a 21-year-old photographer. Born in Saint-Nazaire, he lives in Toulouse. In 2023, he earned his bachelor's degree in photography from ETPA. His work focuses primarily on themes of intimacy, autobiography, and the feeling of loss.
Driven by visual experimentation, he explores the concept of containment through his creative process. His talent was recognized as early as 2023 when he exhibited at the Circulation(s) festival and he won the third edition of the Utopi·e Prize.
Through still and moving images, Mathis Benestebe attempts to grasp the foundations of the feeling of unity. His artistic approach gives form to absences, aiming to achieve a balance, a solid base of available elements. Thus, he naturally gravitates towards autobiography and the gaps in individual and collective memory. Marked by absence and disenchantment, his work acts as tangible proof of his own reality.
The series of photographs exhibited at the Church of the Celestins recounts his experience of a mastectomy, a breast removal operation he underwent in November 2022. Here, this medical transition takes the form of a pause in space and time. Like a three-day interlude in his daily life, this photographic project revolves around feelings of absence and serenity.
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Emmanuel Béranger
The work of Emmanuel Béranger (born in 1997, lives and works in Nantes) is shaped by his sporting background. Having competed in gymnastics and explored other disciplines as a passionate amateur, he has chosen to transpose the physical language of sport into his artistic practice. Through the union of drawing and performance, he explores the plastic possibilities of the body in motion.
By interpreting gestures and rituals borrowed from the world of sports, Emmanuel Béranger attempts to bring them to life through the trace of movement. By marking the trajectory of his own body in charcoal directly onto the wall, he refines athletic skill and brings it closer to choreographic gestures. His work raises a captivating question: could drawing and sport share a common language? His answer seems to emerge, proposing the line as the central symbol of this shared lexicon.
Elsa Chazal
Visual artist and author, Elsa Chazal was born in Lyon in 1999.
After training in choreographic and theatrical studies at the Conservatoire de Lyon, she entered the ENSBA Lyon where she obtained her DNA in 2021 and then her DNSEP in 2023. She lives and works between Lyon and the Haute-Loire department.
Her multifaceted work draws on sculptural, textual, and sonic mediums. It revolves around questions related to the traces left by bodies, to fragments of language forgotten but revived by the power of emotion. After working with dialect as an object, she now focuses on the discourse of love. She explores moments of rupture, playing on the reuse of symbols linked to romance and questioning these bodies, repositories of intimacy. She also questions the speaking body, a sounding board, and what orality contains, from speech to kiss. Through the question of the negative, of the counter-form, of the imprinted body, she seeks a form of abstraction in the figure to shift the tangible toward the imaginary. Her work as a writer questions emotion as a conceptual guide in what she calls autobiographical essays.
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awena Cozannet
Visual artist, born in 1974, lives and works in Romans-sur-Isère.
“My approach is to create from contextual issues, encounters, and materials that I transform.” Awena Cozannet explores humanity’s relationship to the world, its origins, and its temporality through a multifaceted practice. Her sculptural landscapes present an abstract, profound, detached, and symbolic interpretation of the world. The sculpture possesses a physical presence that reactivates an archaic memory of movement; it is the power of the image and the strength of matter. What does this image remind us of? What story does it convey?
Natural, manufactured, and industrial elements coexist in her works, markers of an era or a geographical production. Whether in drawing, sculpture, or performance, her works of assembled lines take on a tangible form and call upon the body, a change of state, and the crossing of borders, be they geographical or cultural. (Lucie Cabane, Creation Notebook).
Darius Dolatdoust
Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust is an artist, performer, choreographer, and designer who lives and works between Marseille, Paris, and Brussels. After studying fashion design at the Duperré School and graphic design at the Estienne School in Paris, he ultimately studied performance and choreography at the Institute of Choreographic Arts (ISAC) within the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 2021, he founded his company DDDMM with Maureen Béguin-Morin. Since September 2023, he has been an artist-in-residence at the FIminco Foundation for a year.
Like an alchemist of visual forms, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust ventures into the intricacies of transformation and hybridization. Through his artistic work, he questions our relationship to the body, to dance, and to language, drawing inspiration from his Iranian roots and the rich Persian heritage.
Through textiles in his patchworks, paintings, and installations, he creates scenes where bodies merge into flat planes of color, defying reality to reveal complex inner worlds. His works, like distorting windows, express a masculine intimacy that resists hegemonic norms, inviting us to explore the boundaries of perception.
Thanks to his unique approach and singular vision, he stands out as an essential voice in the contemporary artistic landscape, enriching the dialogue around identity and bodily expression.
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Françoise Joudrier
A self-taught painter, Françoise Joudrier (born in 1963) lives and works in the Drôme region of France. She has been painting and drawing since the age of 15. Her works have been exhibited both in France and abroad since 2002. In 2020, the Taylor Foundation awarded her the C. Combe Prize.
Françoise Joudrier's painting is characterized by expression, form, color, a theory of sketching, and an absence of narrative. She develops an existential theme focused on particularity and the individual. The body of things. Her "WHO I Am" does not question, does not provide answers; it simply highlights the testimony of being there, alone, unique, particular in its form, singular in its difference from the other.
The TUTTI series, presented in various exhibition spaces, is a work on the human body, which is presented relentlessly. In each painting, the paint and movement are concentrated within this body. It is the place where something happens.
Amandine Maillot
A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art Plastiques de Monaco in 2016, the 35-year-old artist develops work that lies at the crossroads of various disciplines and mediums. She merges visual arts, crafts, staging, and design, revealing a range of creative possibilities. Her marked interest in staging and the object is reflected in a body of work where space, narrative, and poetry engage in dialogue.
Currently, the artist works between mainland France and Réunion Island. By capturing the continuous movement intrinsic to all things and all beings, Amandine Maillot stages fragments of narratives that invite us to reflect on how we inhabit our lives. For her, objects become "vessels of interiority." Their arrangement formulates fragments of stories, sketches of our own journeys, suggested within the very materiality of the objects themselves.
Through a spatial and poetic approach, these inanimate presences suddenly reveal their fragility, challenging us on the issues that are unfolding at every moment of our lives.
Mariam Niare
In her relentless quest for truth and metamorphosis, Mariam Niare explores the boundaries between photography and painting, creating a unique visual language. Her art, a captivating dance between pixels and pigments, captures the essence of her vision of the world to reveal the fragility of our ecosystem.
The perpetually moving bodies that come to life in her creations embody human vulnerability, skillfully transforming pain into visual poetry. Through this subtle marriage of aesthetics and reality, she confronts us with the harsh reality of our impact on the planet. Each piece thus becomes a silent cry against the destruction of our common home, a prayer for a more sustainable future.
In her works, beauty and commitment harmonize in perfect symphony, illustrating her profound conviction for a balanced coexistence between humanity and nature. She invites us to become aware of our power and our responsibility towards the Earth.
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Gilles Pourtier
After studying Modern Literature, Gilles Pourtier trained as a glassmaker in Nancy at the European Center for Research and Training in Glass Arts, which led him to work in London for four years. In 2009, he graduated from the National School of Photography in Arles and participated in the Rencontres de la Photographie that same year. Since then, he has developed a personal practice combining photography, sculpture, and drawing.
Gilles Pourtier's sculptural practice highlights the fragility of our existence. He explores questions related to the materialization of human consciousness and the representation of a collective identity, unique to our humanity, through geometric forms. He strives to contrast materials and sensations through sculptural gestures, which become means of questioning our social body. Through his sensitive work, our vulnerability becomes poetry, our vanity becomes beauty.
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Fu le
Fu Le's eclectic and international background has fostered an artistic practice that is as innovative as it is transformative. By exploring interdisciplinary creation, he fuses dance, video, and new technologies, revealing a unique sensitivity to the body and movement.
Her creations, each a micro-choreography, are inspired by athletic movements slowed to an extreme degree, as if the athletic bodies were floating in the air, between reality and abstraction. They offer an ethereal vision of movement, where each gesture becomes a suspended poem, inviting an ecstatic contemplation of the present moment.
Through his art, he takes us into a universe where the tangible and the intangible merge, offering a unique sensory experience, and encourages us to rethink our relationship to the body, to movement and to the beauty that animates them.
Website
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Patrick Vandecasteele
Patrick Vandecasteele, a 57-year-old painter, lives and works in Malakoff. For the past 15 years, he has painted in oils using a figurative approach, drawing on research from the world of theater and dance. His paintings focus on the human posture, which he seeks to evoke in its infinite nuances of how we present ourselves to the world.
Over the past six years, he has exhibited in Paris, Venice, Milan, and Berlin. Through his paintings, Patrick Vandecasteele explores the physical, psychological, and social postures of humans, as well as the various guises they adopt to conceal their inner turmoil. He focuses particularly on connecting the subject's gesture with the painted gesture to capture the spontaneity of human posture, its fleeting nature, the unconscious that inhabits a body and its bearing, as well as the links between composure and thoughts, gesture and intention, the failed restraint of impulses and words, and the mental struggles that dwell within us.
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Chloé Viton
Chloé Viton, born in 1993 in Lyon, lives and works in Montpellier. A graduate of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier in 2017, she participated in the Tableaux vivants Weekend at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021, where she activated the performance "Cosmic Soup", previously presented at the exhibition "Possédé.es" at La Panacée, Montpellier, in 2020. In 2023, she created the exhibition "The Manilla Room, a creepy pasta by Ziti & Orzo" in duo with Geoffrey Badel at the FRAC Occitanie in Montpellier.
Dreamlike visions, rituals, myths, and scientific narratives all contribute equally to the rich imagination of Chloé Viton. She uses sculpture, drawing, costumes, installation, and performance to materialize the seemingly elusive relationship between unconscious narratives, natural sciences, new cosmogonies, and mythological beliefs. The final result takes the form of mysterious tableaux and sculptural environments.
Her projects feature hybrid bodies—part human, part animal, part plant—derived from reinterpreted mythological narratives interwoven with scientific phenomena. They also explore what the body produces or ingests.
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Salomé Fauc
Born in 1993, Salomé Fauc currently lives and works in Paris. She obtained her DNSEP (National Higher Diploma in Visual Arts) from the ENSBA Lyon in 2017.
At the end of 2018, she won the Fénéon Prize for Contemporary Art. Since graduating, she has obtained various residencies, including at the Camille Claudel Museum where she created large drawings from the museum's collection, and in Uzès, where she created an immersive fresco on the scale of an entire chapel in the town.
She also participates in several exhibitions, including the group exhibition Jardins Imaginaires at the Abbaye de l'Escaladieu.
In 2024 she created a monumental exhibition for the Museum of Fine Arts in Vannes. She was in residence in Angers during the summer.
Drawing and painting occupy her entire practice, as does the plant motif, which she works to its exhaustion and metamorphosis. The aim is to extract it from its decorative shell, restoring its vital force and a form of sacredness.
She works primarily with ink - mainly with her hands, with her fingers - and always exclusively from memory, directly on the paper without ever making a preparatory drawing.
She works flat on the ground, putting her whole body into the task. The contrast between the intricate plant lace she creates and the physical strength she exerts is striking.
In connection with our theme of Body and Movement, we wanted to make visible the creation of her work which she is creating in situ for the Cordeliers chapel and the possibility of returning to follow its evolution.
Project made possible thanks to festival support from the DRAC PACA.
Thierry de Mey
Born in Brussels in 1956, Thierry De Mey stands out as a true alchemist of the arts, fusing music, dance and cinema with rare elegance to create works of unprecedented beauty.
After studying film at IAD, he turned to musical composition, exploring in particular stage music for contemporary dance.
Founder of the Maximalist! ensemble, Thierry De Mey is also a creative force through the Pièces de gestes project and the Ensemble Ictus. His compositions bear witness to his talent and his commitment to musical innovation. Since 2017, as a professor in charge of the IRCAM curriculum, he has been inspiring a new generation of composers.
His work, imbued with poetry and inventiveness, makes him an emblematic figure of the contemporary art scene, an artist whose unique vision continues to redefine the landscape of today's arts.
"Dance film enthusiasts no longer need convincing; it is the most interactive and interdisciplinary art form there is. These are two art forms that place the human body at the center of the practice, two practices where the body is central and in motion."
Nadia Vadori-Gauthier
Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, a French-Canadian artist and Doctor of Arts, stands out for her transdisciplinary approach, weaving together the threads that unite dance, performance and research in aesthetics.
Her work, imbued with a relational ethic, explores the intersections of art with everyday life and the links between humanity and the environment. By integrating movement, sensation, emotion, and imagination into theoretical reflection, she reinvents perception in a world saturated with images, liberating the body from all prejudice. For her, this freedom is key to contemporary aesthetic metamorphoses, calling for an art connected to reality, capable of transforming our relationship to the living world.
Since 2010, she has worked as a choreographer with Corps collectif, exploring collective human and non-human dimensions in symbiosis with the Earth. Since 2015, she has led the project "One Minute of Dance a Day," which will conclude in 2025 after 10 years of daily dance broadcast on social media. A large series of these posts, documenting this daily act of poetic resistance, is presented here.
Edmond Baudoin
Edmond Baudoin, born in Nice in 1942, is emerging as a prominent figure in contemporary comics, marking his work with a fusion between narrative autobiography and an avant-garde aesthetic.
His style is characterized by bold brushstrokes and a striking mastery of black and white, thus carving out his own unique mark on the world of comics. He draws inspiration from his life experiences, personal relationships, and travels, transcending these elements with unparalleled sensitivity and depth.
Beyond his artistic contributions, Edmond Baudoin is also a passionate teacher. From 1999 to 2003, he shared his knowledge at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, influencing a whole new generation of artists with his innovative approach to drawing and visual storytelling.
Throughout his career, he has explored new frontiers in comics, collaborating with writers, and even figures such as the mathematician Cédric Villani, thus shaping the contemporary cultural landscape with his unique artistic vision.
Always interested in dance, he followed the work of the performance group "Le Corps collectif" (The Collective Body), led by Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, for several months. He published this experience in an album, "Le corps collectif," with Éditions l'Association. The original artwork on display is from this album.
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Caroline Bizalion
Born in Arles in 1981, Caroline Bizalion has lived and worked in the Vaucluse region since 2019. A graduate of the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in 2004, she subsequently specialized in design and sewing, thus confirming her multidisciplinary practice and placing her exploration of form and gesture at the heart of her artistic work. Several stays in the United States, Latin America, and Asia have allowed her to broaden her horizons and develop an immersive practice, which she regularly pursues through residencies with local artistic and social organizations.
Collecting forms and materials that inspire her creations, Caroline Bizalion draws on diverse resources from the territories she explores. She is particularly interested in the "off-screen" dimension of these gleaned forms and their aspects not immediately visible. Her numerous collections are then reinterpreted in drawing, sculpture, and ceramics, presented as installations, or used as a medium during performances, thus becoming serially integrated into new narratives.
His practice also includes a methodical approach to creation, a kind of carefully defined itinerary that establishes a dialogue between each series. The notions of preservation and permanence are evoked, questioning what remains and what disappears.
The final installment of a trilogy of residencies supported by the "Reopen the world" grant from the DRAC PACA, Caroline Bizalion's work this year brought together her two previous audiences, nursery children and seniors from nursing homes, for an unprecedented creative encounter where the transgenerational exchange revealed an invaluable richness.
Chiharu Mamiya, Jean Sanchez and Pedro Prazeres
Immersed in the daily life of the Le Village association, their project explores how our perceptions influence our landscapes. The trio of artists presents immersive, visual, sound, and gestural installations inspired by the life of the place and its inhabitants.
Jean Sanchez, a sound artist, Pedro Prazeres, a choreographer and landscape architect, and Chiharu Mamiya, a performer and choreographer, live between Marseille and the Cévennes mountains. Alongside their individual projects, they collaborate within the LIM (Landscape in Motion) collective. Their artistic activities extend both in France and internationally, notably to Marseille, Berlin, Prague, Zurich, Barcelona, and Lisbon. They are currently combining their practices.
Project supported by the "Reopen the world" grant from the DRAC PACA.
macha polivka
Through a sensory experience, Macha Polivka invites us to become aware of and experience our presence in space. Inspired by Sama, the whirling dervish dance, she connects, through the spiraling trance of this gyratory movement, with the manifestation of the cyclical. Her whirling captivates and enchants us with its mysterious ability to lead us to the very edges of the visible. Macha Polivka's practice is a committed quest, an exploration of what she calls "the tangible invisible."
Theatre and dance have been her preferred fields of expression and exploration since childhood. However, it was in 2016 that Macha Polivka's artistic trajectory took on a new dimension and a meaning she had always sought, when she was introduced, almost simultaneously and by a certain "chance," to Sufi dance and shamanic practices. From then on, Macha dedicated herself to exploring the moving body as a means of opening consciousness and illuminating the connection between the visible and invisible worlds. She dedicates her artistic practice to the crossroads of art and healing, thus reconnecting with the creative and healing body.
The theme of this new edition, focusing on the body and movement, has inspired the Parcours de l'Art to explore invisible worlds that certain artists penetrate and gracefully render tangible. Macha's whirling dance and ritual art will take place within the exhibition spaces, unleashing the full power of performance.