Cocktail Reception for Opening Passages at 6018|North

This exhibition is part of a multisite project produced by Villa Albertine and its City/Cité program. It is also part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.

At 6018|North, the works of five photographers will be exhibited: Jonathan Michael Castillo and Gilberto Güiza-Rojas focus on the notion of work, Rebecca Topakian and Marion Poussier question the border or margin, and Marzena Abrahamik takes an interest in the Polish community in Chicago. Each of them, in their own way, highlights multiple, fragmented, or superimposed life trajectories. These works find a particular echo in the Edgewater neighborhood, which is characterized by the cohabitation of communities of very diverse origins.

Marzena Abrahamik

Recipient in 2023 of the Chicagoland Seen grant commission funded by the Chicago chapter of the Albertine Foundation.
In Return Abrahamik chronicles stories of migration in reverse, based above all on the experience of Polish immigrants, like her and her family. After decades of building a life in Chicago, some are returning to Poland in retirement to access lower costs of living and a public healthcare system. To channel these complex processes of cultural translation and identity formation, Abrahamik’s images speak through a grammar of symbols tied to Polish life, whose meaning is at once fixed and fluid.

Jonathan Michael Castillo

Recipient in 2023 of the Chicagoland Seen grant commission funded by the Chicago chapter of the Albertine Foundation.
Jonathan Castillo has been capturing immigrant-owned shops across Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. The series Immigrant Owned resists the classifying impulse of a documentary survey, instead offering an eclectic mix of the people and places he encounters in his exploration of the city.

Gilberto Güiza-Rojas

2018 laureate of the national photographic commission Regards du Grand Paris (Views of the Grand Paris), led by the Ateliers Médicis in collaboration with the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap).
In Gilberto Güiza-Rojas’ series Territoire-Travail (Territory-Work), workers perform an idealized vision of manual labor superimposed against remote urban backdrops, representing what he calls “gestures of insertion.” Through these staged performances, individuals re-enact gestures tied to their former occupations against transformed settings, hinting at the vestiges of their former lives.

Marion Poussier

2021 laureate of the national photographic commission Regards du Grand Paris (Views of the Grand Paris), led by the Ateliers Médicis in collaboration with the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap).
The various redevelopment programs of the banks of the Saint-Denis Canal in Paris have made this changing territory a difficult space to inhabit. However, in these spaces undergoing a process rationalization process, certain forms of life resist and oppose the uses to come. Bodies assert themselves and gestures persist, like a claim to ownership of the place. The title of the series On est là  refers to the notion of “being there” that the artist wishes to capture.

Rebecca Topakian

2021 laureate of the national photographic commission Regards du Grand Paris (views of the Grand Paris), led by the Ateliers Médicis in collaboration with the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap).
Halfway between a scientific undertaking and a poetic reverie, Rebecca Topakian’s series (n=6-9) explores the Greater Paris area through exotic birds: the rose-ringed parakeets. Escaped from Orly airport in 1974, they have multiplied to over eight thousand. With ethologists, the artist captures their flight using infrared photography. She draws parallels between the discourse on these exotic birds from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia that have settled in Paris, and the discourse on other migrations, this time of human beings and the pejorative terminologies that surround them.

Since 2021, the Paris-Chicago dialogue has been flourishing under the umbrella of “Clichycago,” with the support of the Ateliers Médicis in Clichy-sous-Bois / Montfermeil (France) and the Chicago branch of Villa Albertine. It is conceived as a platform for community-based cultural exchange and artistic experimentation.