Sylvain Lizon, Director of EPA Villa Arson, is delighted to announce the appointment of Marie-Ann Yemsi as Director of the Villa Arson art center.
This decision was taken by a selection committee comprising representatives of the DGCA (Direction générale de la création artistique), the DRAC PACA, two qualified personalities from art colleges and art centers, and the establishment’s management.
Marie-Ann Yemsi will take up her new position on September 4. She succeeds Éric Mangion, who held the position from 2006 to 2023 before joining Frac Occitanie in Montpellier as director.
Marie-Ann Yemsi’s project for the Villa Arson art center is called “Faire Monde(s)”, in the sense of “reaffirming the place of art as an essential, shared asset”:
- Faire Monde(s) (Make World(s)) is committed to working with artists to promote the collective nature of the emergence of all works of art and the ideas that inspire them.
- Faire Monde(s) is an invitation to meet with and discuss their artistic, poetic and free gestures, to propose other points of view on history and contemporary realities, and thus open up new and emancipating perspectives on understanding the world.
- Faire-Monde(s) through the effective implementation of hospitality and inclusivity practices: reaching out to, including and representing the diversity of the people the institution addresses, as well as developing its soci(et)al and innovative role in terms of cultural rights.
Through this project, Marie-Ann Yemsi wishes to reactivate and reinterpret the pioneering spirit and singular approach of the Villa Arson, affirming the importance of utopian acts at the heart of its history and missions.
“Also a driving force behind student training, the Villa Arson art center contributes to the internationalization of the establishment, notably through its close links with the residency program. It also plays a central role in the development of new career paths combining art education, research and curatorial practices,” explains Sylvain Lizon. “At this pivotal time, when the imperatives of climate change are a source of reinvention for cultural and artistic institutions, the Villa Arson art center will contribute more than ever, with the arrival of Marie-Ann Yemsi, to the reflections and projects carried out within professional networks at local, regional and national level. As a fully-fledged player in Nice’s dense and dynamic cultural network, it will continue to collaborate actively with various structures at the crossroads of disciplines. In keeping with the expectations of the Centre d’Art Contemporain d’Intérêt National label, the art center will continue to implement a sustained and innovative approach to its audiences, attentive to their diversity”.
“The ambition of Faire Monde(s) is to create the conditions for intense proximity to creation for all, and to propose, through the artists’ gestures, new intelligibilities of the world,” explains Marie-Ann Yemsi.
Marie-Ann Yemsi, a Frenchwoman of German and Cameroonian origin, is an independent curator and contemporary art consultant based in Paris (France). With a degree in political science, she pays particular attention to the theoretical, critical and aesthetic productions of the global South, and develops multidisciplinary artistic programs at the intersection of visual arts, performance, dance, music and writing. Her projects are particularly focused on collaborative artistic practices and experimental forms, highlighting themes of memory, history, gender and identity in relation to the political, social and ecological issues of today’s world. In 2005, she founded Agent Créatif(s), a cultural production and contemporary art consultancy workshop dedicated to promoting emerging artists from the African continent and its diasporas. She has curated numerous international exhibitions, including Odyssées africaines at the Brass in Brussels in 2015, Le jour qui vient at the Galerie des Galeries in Paris in 2017, A silent Lines, Lives Here in 2018 and Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream in late 2021-2022 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and A World of Illusions: Grada Kilomba at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town (South Africa) in late 2022. She was notably Artistic Director of Afrotopia, the 11th edition of Les Rencontres de Bamako – Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (December 2017 – January 2018) and will curate the 19th edition of MOMENTA Biennale de l’image to be held in Montreal in autumn 2025. Winner of the Villa Albertine residency program, she will conduct a research project in the United States in early 2025.