Presenting Villa Albertine’s 2025-26 Post-Residency Grantees 

With the support of Ardian and a jury of partner institutions, including Villa Albertine, the French Academy of Fine Arts, and the Institut français, the post-residency program will allocate 27 grants to Villa Albertine residents who completed their exploratory projects in the United States in 2024.   

This program aims to support promising post-residency initiatives in order to transform them into tangible achievements that strengthen transatlantic ties and creative thinking around contemporary issues.   

After a call for projects addressed to the 70 residents of the 2024 cohort, a total of 27 grants will be allocated to organizations in France and the United States for projects listed below.

17 grants have been awarded to the following residents from the 2024 general residency program:

• Lydia Amarouche will develop a partnership between Shed publishing in Marseille and Wendy’s Subway in New York. She will explore distribution methods and the economies and ecologies of independent publishing. The project will culminate in a collective publication.  
• Selorm Attikpo will celebrate both 50 years of hip-hop and 10 years of yoyo tinz, the organization he founded to promote, document, and archive Ghanaian hip-hop. He will draw on curatorial methodologies studied during his residency in Atlanta and New York to propose a month-long exhibition that will serve as the basis for a future hip-hop museum in Ghana. 
• Oliver Beer will map one of New York’s most remarkable resonant spaces, its historic water reservoirs, whose potential for resonance remains largely unknown, in collaboration with contacts created during his residency.  
• Jean-Philippe Billman will give a choral conducting masterclass to Boston University students in preparation for their end-of-year concert, creating a methodology that combines American and European pedagogy. This will launch a long-term collaboration between Boston University and the Ecole des Hauts Arts du Rhin, creating a strong partnership between the two conducting classes and the two sister cities. 
• Julia Bourdet will publish her graphic novel resulting from her car-and-airplane-free residency on container ships, by bike and by train. The graphic novel will blend travel diary and illustrations, and will reflect on contemporary of ecology and public policy, examining how individuals can shape collective change for the environment. 
• Christophe Chassol & Boris Memmi will create a scenic performance project combining live music and projection, based on a music demo building on previous and new choir recordings from New York and Chicago. 
• Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques will draw on his extensive research on Black Mountain College to conduct a series of workshops with local participants; organize a 30-day collaborative lab bringing together 10 French and American artists; and produce a graphic novel in dialogue with AI. This piece will weave historical narratives and contemporary reinterpretations together, using AI and retcon methods to reimagine the legacy of Black Mountain College. 
• Penda Diouf will showcase her images of New York City, which create a parallel between the city’s grid-like streets and the looplike repetitions associated with minimalist music, as part of an exhibit on Julius Eastman, his life, his music, and New York City. This will provide a better understanding of the architectural context in which Eastman worked and evolved. 
• Tarik Kiswanson will produce a film about two American cabinetmakers, George Nakashima and Thomas Day, whom he researched during his residency. The furniture created by these two cabinetmakers embodies moments of great violence and collective trauma in American society: the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War for the former, slavery and racial segregation for the latter.  
• Mathilde Lavenne will create The Land I Live On, a VR experience centered on the figure of Annie Buchanan, an African-American seer born in Corsicana who helped industry locate the first oil wells in Texas.  
• Johanna Makabi will finalize her feature-length documentary. Motherland is the story of Louisiana-born Sabrina Marie Ramsey, who grew up on her father’s ranch near Dallas, Texas, and pursues her dream of becoming a ballerina at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York. 
• Geoffroy Mathieu will publish a book consisting of 80 photographs, with text by writer and artist Hannah Palmer, a native of Atlanta’s South Side. These photographs explore Atlanta’s landscapes as experienced by the people who walk out of obligation. This project will be paired with a group exhibition organized by La Friche La belle de mai (Marseille) in 2026, as well as an ephemeral exhibition and community walk in Atlanta. 
• Céline Minard will invite Jenna Didier (Former Executive Director of LA River Arts) to France, as part of their respective research into American and French river and stream networks, comparing the two countries’ approaches to hydraulic construction. 
• Dalia Naous & Marik Renner will finalize a multidisciplinary performance inspired by their residency, combining theater, dance, sound, and video. They will work in the Miami Light Project studio; present excerpts of their work to local dance and theater artists; and consolidate partnerships initiated during the residency.   
• Anne Paceo will return to New Orleans to form a band with Louisiana musicians, continuing her exploration of voodoo and hoodoo and how they translate into music today. 
• Mathilde Pellé‘s exhibition will offer a thorough rendering of the investigative work she carried out during her residency aboard the Marius container ship. She intends to share the sensory and sensitive experience of her crossing. She aims to shed light on material realities of maritime transport, and to bring to the forefront the men of the sea who operate these systems, without whom the globalized daily life of Western societies would not be possible. She will also present her documentary film Tonnes. 
• Marine Schneider will write and illustrate a comic strip for children on the relationship between people and the landscape that surrounds them. This project, born from her residency in Louisiana, will especially focus on communities’ relationship to water, exploring the direct effects of climate change on local daily lives. 

In addition, four post-residency grants will be specifically dedicated to residents of the “Inhabiting the Desert” collective program in Marfa,Texas, with support from AXA:

• Adèle Humbert will produce a series of podcasts on access to abortion in Texas and Mexico. In six episodes combining testimonials, analyses, and sound creations, she will explore the contrasts on both sides of the border over a two-year period, in collaboration with caregivers, jurists, and activists. 
• Alice Loumeau will continue her investigation into the ecological disasters linked to the oil industry and the draining of agricultural land. The result is an editorial project combining narrative, investigation and cartography, envisaged as a political and poetic tool. 
• Josefina Paz will create a land art installation in the Santa Teresa corridor, as an extension of her residency devoted to the challenges of habitability in desert areas. Two poetic phrases from her residency writings will be ephemerally etched in the landscape, in a choreographed performance. This collaborative project will bring together artists and associations met during her residency. 
• Grégoire Schaller will develop the performance No Country for Old Fag around the figure of the cowboy, combining country culture and the rave scene of the 1990s in a queer and critical reading of colonial heritage (with the support of the Ménagerie de verre and the Ballet national de Marseille). He will also prepare an exhibition in Marfa, which will combine photography, video footage, and testimonials gathered during his residency. 

Six post-residency grants will be dedicated specifically to professions in art and design, with support from the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation:    

• Joseph Arzoumanov-Dhedin will draw inspiration from both artificial intelligence and craftsmanship, in particular embroidery, which he explored during his Boston residency, to create L’Échiquier des Songes (The Chessboard of Dreams), an art installation combining AI, gold embroidery, 3D printing, jewelry-making, and stone-cutting. 
• Chloé Bensahel will return to the MIT Media Lab to develop works combining textiles, computer science and artificial intelligence, in collaboration with three researchers. They will create hand-woven pieces capable of remembering and processing data like computers.  
• Jean-Marc Bullet will create a collection of 10 objects in collaboration with African-American designer Patti Carpenter. This collection will showcase precious basket-weaving skills, handed down by descendants of American women living in the north of Martinique, paired with glassmaking know-how local to Brooklyn, New York. 
• Garance Maurer will organize public events in collaboration with local actors she met during her residency, building upon her research on intentional practices of controlled fires in California.  
• Juliane Morel, whose artistic practice focuses on mental health, will develop olfactory mediation objects designed to accompany children in psychiatric care. She will also collaborate with a Philadelphia research center to create an olfactory immersion room for medical research purposes. 
• Céline Salomon will participate in her second edition of the Collectible fair with a dedicated booth. She will be presenting new pieces imagined during her residency: a console, a chandelier, a coffee table, and a wall installation resulting from her research on enamel. 

Villa Albertine’s post-residency grants are made possible thanks to the generous support of Ardian.