From April 10 to May 11, 2025, La Villette hosts the exhibition 100% L’EXPO.
Seven Villa Arson graduates have been selected to take part in this exhibition: Léo Dupré, Valentine Gardiennet, Emika Lannelongue, Carlota Sandoval-Lizarralde, Romain Ravera, Sofia Rocha Mondragon and Murphy Yum.
Léo Dupré
Nourished by legends, Léo Dupré’s soft sculptures appear to be gateways to occult journeys. His sinuously curved works are decorated with a collection of small manufactured or salvaged objects. These evolve over the course of the work’s life, acting as talismans announcing the universe it conceals. Léo’s thick, brightly-colored fleece canvases are the fleecy totems of a New Hell – a happy hell – around which to gather. In this post-apocalyptic context, he is interested in the aesthetics of outdoor equipment and its survivalist connotations, useful for crossing the lores he projects.
Valentine Gardiennet
Valentine Gardiennet graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 2020 and is a resident at the Wonder workshops in Clichy. Her installations combine physical fabrication techniques, from molding and modeling to ceramic processing, with improvised, makeshift techniques such as papier-mâché, chicken wire and silicone. In a play on scale that oscillates between enlargement and shrinkage, Valentine Gardiennet transposes her notebook drawings into three-dimensional objects, mischievously hijacking the elements of reality that inhabit our everyday lives. She deploys a universally comprehensible vocabulary in space through playlets with popular references from TV series, comic strips and fairy tales.
Emika Lannelongue
Emika Lannelongue, currently based in Paris, graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’art de la Villa Arson in 2022. Her work revolves around the links between memory and recording, exploring these notions primarily through the photographic medium. Emika questions the many facets of this medium, notably its ability to capture, freeze or transform memories, while playing with its technical and formal limits. By blending personal and collective narratives, she creates works that invite in-depth reflection on these themes. Continuing her research, Emika enriches her visual universe by experimenting with new narrative forms, while emphasizing the intimacy and subtlety of the stories she tells.
Carlota Sandoval Lizarralde
Born in 1996, Colombian Carlota Sandoval Lizarralde lives and works in Paris. In 2021, she graduated from ENSA Villa Arson (Nice) and won the Prix Pierre Cardin in sculpture from the Académie des Beaux-Arts. She has benefited from residencies at the Cité internationale des arts (2024, Paris), Ateliers Médicis (2024, Aude), Consulat Voltaire (2023, Paris), Maison Artagon (2023, Loiret) and Villa Belleville (2022, Paris). Since September 2024, she has been a resident at Artagon Pantin. In 2025, she took part in 100% La Villette and exhibited again at the Magasins Généraux and at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles as a finalist in the Prix Carré sur Seine. Her second solo show “Laisse la main cueillir” will be on view until May 4 in the Plateau Project Room at the Frac Ile-de-France, invited by Maëlle Dault. Carlota Sandoval Lizarralde is one of five winners of the Hôtel de Craon residency in La Rochelle, financed by the Encore endowment funds.
Romain Ravera
Graduating from Villa Arson in 2023, Romain Ravera has set up his studio in the industrial zone of Contes (just outside his native Nice), an environment from which he draws his resources and aesthetics. The 26-year-old artist builds his entire plastic vocabulary from real-life objects stolen from urban outskirts, industrial zones, wastelands and demolition sites. It’s as if he can still observe the ruins of our contemporary societies in these places.
Sofia Rocha Mondragon
Sofia Rocha Mondragon was born in Mexico City in 2000. She develops her practice around painting, but is also attracted by other media, such as ceramics and installation. The artist’s imagination is rooted in personal references and memory, as well as in the stories that shaped her childhood. His compositions are sprinkled with borrowings from Pop(ular) culture, literature, the digital world and painting. She places her images as descendants of magic realism, exploring the bittersweet sensation of memory becoming fantasy. Through transparencies, masks and motifs, she attempts to create a universe on the border between reality and her own fantasy. She seeks to give the viewer an active role in the exhibition space, and also questions the role that hanging can play in creating interactions between canvases, thereby creating new narratives.
Murphy Yum
A 2021 graduate of Villa Arson, Murphy Yum lives and works between Ardèche and Muju (South Korea). When his installations encounter a tragic gaze, a perceptual gap is created, forming a hidden refuge where personal emotions unfold freely. This tension projects intimate narratives onto the installation, questioning collective memory and social norms. She explores the impact of clumsy, worn-out objects on the individual and civilization, using low-tech methods to redefine their scope. Attracted by the vibrations of disorder-a form of “domestic diaspora”-she seeks a balance between chaos and structure. In these moving installations, Murphy collects and manipulates images from shop windows, flyers and the internet to explore “false nostalgia”, where fragile memories are artificially revived through familiar objects. His work proposes a fluid, non-hierarchical perception of the world, freed from fixed perspectives.
100% L’EXPO
Neither a contemporary art fair nor a thematic exhibition, 100% L’EXPO is conceived as a non-exhaustive snapshot of young creation, presenting a plurality of profiles and subjects with each new edition. Works by some forty artists are displayed over 3,500 m2 in the Grande Halle de la Villette, in a scenography composed entirely of elements salvaged from previous events. Each year, La Villette collaborates with French art schools to present recently graduated artists.
With the aim of showcasing the emerging scene more widely, 100% L’EXPO extends invitations each year to collectives, festivals, residencies and the media, to demonstrate the diversity and richness of a contemporary art ecosystem designed by and for young artists. This year’s two highlights are April 12, with an invitation to the Manifesto XXI media organization for the release of their magazine “Comment s’aimer quand c’est la fin du monde?”, and a major weekend of performances on April 19 and 20.
Artist selection
The artists were selected by a jury comprising Cédric Fauq, chief curator at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Flora Fettah, art critic and independent curator, Shivay La Multiple, artist who took part in the 2023 edition of 100% L’EXPO, and Inès Geoffroy, exhibition project manager at La Villette and curator.
For further information, visit the La Villette website.
