Magazine

Villa Albertine resident Léa Hirschfeld is the creator of the podcast Décalés, which highlights the different dimensions of disability – intellectual, physical and mental – and recounts both the lived experience of disability and the experiences of loved ones. During her residency, Léa traveled throughout the United States, discovering how disability is experienced across the country and sharing the stories she discovered along the way.

Is the notion of Cultural Rights, which appeared nearly 80 years ago, still relevant in the age of the Internet? In this article, based on their intervention at the Night of Ideas in Atlanta, Marie Picard and Emmanuel Vergès place themselves at the intersection of cultural rights and digital cultures to envision a new cultural framework that is inclusive, open and sustainable. The stakes are high; it is nothing less than the possibility of democracy.

Activist and researcher Terence Lester investigates the roots of hostile architecture and its impact on homelessness and discrimination. Drawing from personal experiences of racism in the Jim Crow south, Lester explores the intersection of race, class, and homelessness. As hostile architecture further marginalizes those without an address, this article illuminates the power of belonging, re-imaging homelessness through the Lens of Martin Luther Kings’s b “Beloved Community”, and urging readers to confront systemic barriers for a more inclusive and just society.

At the Night of Ideas event at Harvard University, Jean Arnaud, a co-founder of a startup focused on providing AI-enabled immersive learning environments, discussed the potential of combining artificial intelligence and immersive technologies in education. Arnaud explored how these technologies could revolutionize the way we approach learning, with the use of avatars combined with AI yielding exceptional benefits for students, including promoting personal development and inclusion. However, he also shows the importance of recognizing the limits of these thechnologies, which should be used as a tool to amplify human intelligence and ideas, not to control them.

The term resilience, originally defined as the ability of a material to bounce back, has evolved through its use by various disciplines, including ecology and economics. Yet measuring a city’s resilience remains elusive. In this article, echoing her intervention at the Night of Ideas in Monterrey, architect Ophélia Mantz proposes to consider the notion of civitas and adaptation as a more precise term that reflects the progressive change of the urban system in response to crises. The concepts of ecosophy and temporal ecology are also mobilized in the quest to modify our lifestyles, to build a convivial society based on well-being and quality of life.

One can be a historian of the United States, a specialist in Black history and theories of Afrodiasporic descent, and yet be struck by the specificity of Atlanta. This was Maboula Soumahoro’s experience during her residency, and she concluded that theoretical knowledge—such as the conditions of emergence of a figure like Martin Luther King or of Hip Hop culture—does not replace physical experience in understanding how a Southern city became a major home for the Black-African diaspora.

At the age of 23, Franco-British conductor Stéphanie Childress has already made an important impact on the world of orchestras. Currently one of the very few women to conduct an orchestra in the U.S. as assistant conductor with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, she has managed to get away from it all as part of her residency with Villa Albertine, to discover other great American orchestras. Her objective is to determine if and how a city’s culture affects the way its orchestra sounds. And what part women now play in this story.

Is the notion of landscape still relevant in an urban environment, especially when we talk about the city par excellence: Chicago? Architect and researcher Jennifer Buyck questions, at the age of anthropocene, the ways to renew the link between the living and the urban. It is by strolling along the river, camera in hand, that she investigated how it has played such an important role in the construction of the city, and how it could play an equally important role in the necessary ecological turn of the metropolitan construction.

How to read, see and exhibit Yvonne Rainer’s work today? This was the question at the heart of Arlène Berceliot Courtin’s residency. In this interview with Jo-ey Tang, she discusses the legacy of the iconic American dancer and choreographer, a leading figure in postmodern and minimalist dance.

Strange as it may seem, Art History has been late in addressing the construction of racial identities. Yet the questions of what is seen, what is shown, the invention of “blackness” and “whiteness” are central, as Anne Lafont has brilliantly demonstrated. The historian navigates between the periods of the 18th and 19th century, and has shown how a look is built then on the Black bodies, in a manner consistent with the formation of an artistic canon. Canon which is today reappropriated and questioned by Black artists.

New York is a sonorous city, one could even say that it is a city that has a taste for noise. It draws much of its energy from this, a vitality that soundscape artist Michel Risse and his company Décor Sonore came to explore during their residency at Villa Albertine. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, author and electroacoustician, Michel Risse studied music and percussion, which he practiced in numerous rock and jazz bands. In 1972, he began to develop an interest in sound creation in free-space, and to compose his first “sound decors”. His encounter in New York with the sound painting collective Strike Anywhere gave rise to various experiments in Battery Park and elsewhere… The opportunity to define this function of sound landscaper that Michel Risse has been cultivating for 50 years, in the wake of composer John Cage who declared: “I have never listened to a sound without appreciating it. The only problem with sounds is music.

A philosopher, economist, writer and musician, the Senegalese Felwine Sarr is one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the moment. In recent years, his work has taken on a new form: that of plays. Two of them are currently on tour in the United States, and carry this singular voice that invites us to believe in the possibility of utopia.

From traditional Mexican art to contemporary border art, let us look back at Art History at the US–Mexico border. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have given their fingerprints, Mexican muralism left its mark here. The voice of Chicanos still resonates. Today’s border artists are walking in their footsteps, like walking a tightrope between two countries held together by force. Is passion possible in a marriage of convenience? Will they turn divides into hyphens? French author of documentaries Aude-Emilie Judaïque explored the border as part of her Villa Albertine residency to answer these questions.

Emma Goldman was a figure of anarchism, a political movement whose significance at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States has since been forgotten. Filmmaker Yolande Zauberman came to New York to follow in the footsteps of this young Russian Jewish refugee, who became a powerful woman and a public figure of feminism and workers’ rights. Here is an intimate—and therefore political—portrait.

Co-writing a script with a machine… what if that were possible? Such was the bet Simon Bouisson made during his Albertine residency in California. Here, he tells us about his sci-fi-like working method alongside a co-author capable of unfolding a dizzying maze of potential paths, devoid of ethics and logic.

What is left of San Francisco’s queer history? Writer Hélène Giannecchini came to SF with Sasha J. Blondeau and François Chaignaud, with whom she is preparing the show “Cortèges” for the Philharmonie de Paris. Though the hoped-for encounter with her story is more difficult than expected, there is one place that brings back all of those who have left their mark on the history of struggles for LGBTQIA+ rights: Aunt Charlie’s Lounge.

On May 21, the 2022 Night of Idea took place in New York and offered a two-part event in Manhattan and in Brooklyn, for an audience of nearly 1,500 people. A video report by Raphaël Bourgois and Romain Thomassin allows to take the measure of the event, of its richness and diversity.

In a joint interview, Curator and Deputy Director of the Department of Islamic Art at the Musée du Louvre Judith Henon, and Sarah Schleuning, the Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), discuss the scientific, historical, and contemporary issues surrounding the exhibition “Cartier and the Arts of Islam: In search of Modernity.”. The objective is to understand, beyond the aesthetic interest, what this exhibition, which was first presented in Paris, tells us about the place of Islamic arts at the time of the Cartier brothers and their place today in France and the United States.

What brings together Bruce Lee, skateboarding, Clint Eastwood, rap… and the small Norman town of Flers? When he was a young Iraqi refugee, Sameer Ahmad built up a very personal culture – the product, as he says today, of a fantasized vision of America. Having become one of the most interesting French Hip Hop musicians of his generation, he deconstructs this mythical vision in his texts.

Although scientists have been sounding the alarm for us to take action in the face of the climate emergency, power remains in the hands of a few, at the expense of individual, local and solidarity-based action. For Claire Sagan, it is urgent to revolutionize the way we make decisions in order to achieve a common progress – the only desirable horizon when we ask ourselves “where are we going?”.

“I don’t know where I’m going, so I write,” was how novelist Leïla Slimani concluded her moving speech at the Night of Ideas 2022 at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York. In an interview with the Villa Albertine magazine, she discusses the issues that run through her work and her commitments: feminism, immigration, identity, racism, and, of course, the role of literature.

How may the European Union draw inspiration from the “Federalist Papers”? No less than the secular bible of the American Republic, this work signed James Madison and Alexander Hamilton offers a reflection on sovereignty which, according to Hugo Toudic, should serve as the basis for Europeans’ questionings. While the invasion of Ukraine by Russia compels us to rethink the question of sovereignty, the EU gains a new lease of life, becoming once again a horizon where the question “where are we going?” may be answered.

Dwelling on the pandemic and its aftermath on the population, Nathalie Etoké answers the question posed by the Night of Ideas, “Where are we going?”, by pointing out how this period has exposed the social disparities. Hidden behind our masks, our attention is focused on those who are usually left behind by society.

Covid has disrupted the parameters of our society by profoundly shifting the relationship between obedience and freedom. From then on, answering the question “where are we going?”, asked on the occasion of the Night of Ideas 2022, means taking up the political challenge of rethinking our collective and social obligations, the role of the State, the balance of rights and duties… in short, citizenship.

The horizon is the place we will never reach, because no matter how much closer we get to it, it never stops receding. Dwelling on this paradox, Victorien Coquery embarks on a philosophical reflection to answer the question posed by the Night of Ideas, “Where are we going?”—for by wanting to reach the horizon at all costs, don’t we end up losing it, or at least disrupting it?

Who remembers the Soviet “Summer of Love”? Estonian anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Terje Toomistu brings back to mind Soviet hippies and their struggle for peace and freedom. The example of their passive resistance, by means of small gestures, offers perspectives in the current context of repression of pacifism, and opposition to the war of aggression in Ukraine.

Where are we going? This question posed by the Night of Ideas was reflected in Paul Gauguin’s masterpiece painted in Tahiti in 1897-1898, and preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painter, like singer Jacques Brel decades later, found a form of answer to this question in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands—an answer they took to their graves, and a source of meditation for poet Sylvie Kandé.

Atlanta is often considered the “Black Mecca,” the real-life embodiment of the legendary Wakanda of superhero Black Panther. And yet, for historian Maurice J. Hobson, this vision inherited from the city’s past—as the cradle of the Civil Rights movement and land of Martin Luther King Jr—is more nuanced. Black people’s true experiences are more diverse than the clichéd image, and Atlanta needs a new impetus towards equality and inclusion.

During the US Goncourt Prize Selection ceremony on April 30, 2022, Anne Berest’s “La Carte Postale” was awarded, and writer Siri Hustvedt spoke to the students part of the jury. In her speech copied below, the president of the 2022 edition of the prize revisited what it means to defend a book.

To ask “Where are we going?” in a world marked by pandemic, climate catastrophe and war, is to ask what we want to (re)build together. This term, together, is fundamental, and is at the heart of new social and political movements that have emerged in the United States and Europe.

How can we respond to the question “Where are we going?” without looking at school as a place where the future is built? Education specialist Professor Noah W. Sobe invites us to free ourselves from this vision of school as a tool to control tomorrow. Paradoxically, if education is to truly help build the future, we should not try to anticipate.

To know where we are going, we must gaze at the night, welcome the freedom it brings, and make out the lights breaking through the darkness. Such a stance drives the work carried out by BOA Light Studio as they light buildings around the world and enable us, over one Night of Ideas, to escape the frames imposed by daytime and the hustle that comes with it. The goal? To allow the imagination and the unexpected to spread out, disrupt, and question our bearings.

The question posed by the Night of Ideas, “Where are we going?”, firstly demands that we know where we come from. The knowledge of our past is essential to go wherever we want to go. The afro-optimism of American writer and activist James Baldwin may still inspire us today to become a better version of ourselves.

Everything in Chicago is subject to the grid, structuring—which is not to say constraining—the relationships between the inhabitants and their environment. The GRAU Collective—made up of architects and urbanists Susanne Eliasson and Anthony Jammes—went to the main metropolis in the Midwest in order to understand how the physical space of the city may be redesigned.

(LA)HORDE speaks with a single voice. This collective body created by the artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel actually goes beyond the three individuals; at the heart of their practice, dance becomes a sensitive and political place where questions related to gender, racism, sexuality, and power are addressed. From New York to Los Angeles, (LA)HORDE sought out what makes people tick.

Director and movie lover—or perhaps was it the other way around—Bertrand Tavernier died on March 25, 2021. American filmmaker Taylor Hackford remembers his friend and their fiery debates on the seventh art, youth, and moral dilemmas. The depiction he gives of his work is that of an inexhaustible defender of justice, whose influence will radiate for the generations to come.