Mawena Yehouessi was the first graduate (2019–2024) of the PhD in project-based research conceived by Villa Arson and the Université Côte d’Azur.
On Thursday 12 December 2024, Yehouessi defended (t)he(i)r thesis entitled “Poïetiques afrofuturistes. Trimer trames à l’intersection du collage et de la curation” at Villa Arson.
Mawena Yehouessi
Born in 1990 in Cotonou (Benin), Mawena Yehouessi is a self-described collisionist: a multi-hyphenate curator, researcher and artist. Founder of the collective Black(s) to the Future, they live and work between Nice and Paris, France. D(é)riv(e)ing forward through alter-futurisms and poiethics, Yehouessi’s collaborative, forward-looking practice is based on im-ploration and collage, making space and time collide | confront | capsize. From a background in literature and philosophy, cultural project management and contemporary dance, Yehouessi belongs to those unclassifiable/de(*)classified generations whose realities, practices and worlds, whose “professions” are a succession of slashes, soro-commons and shifts.
The thesis
In turn recombining and gambling (on) a set of practices that are simultaneously speculative, artistic and collective, at any rate mined from survival strategies and (so-)called “minoritarian” necessities, Yehouessi’s aim is not to create or decrypt new methods, knowledge or theories of art, but to put them to the — concrete and collective — test in space-times where co-existence is a synonym of co-creation. Combining Afrofuturism and Black Studies, artistic/curatorial realities, writing/translation and teaching/research, Yehouessi invited, through three separate projects — a film/series, Sol in the Dark, a choreographic installation, “NSNAMDLM”, and the exhibition/workshops to “The Fire Next Time” — a multi-plicity of fe/*/male practitioners and friends to co-create situations of hostility and hospitality, of feats and defeats, of rage, toil, support and sympathy.
Supervisors
Jean François Trubert, Professor of Musicology, Université Côte d’Azur
Sophie Orlando, Professor of Art Theory, Villa Arson
Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Professor of Philosophy, Paris 8 and now Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture, NYU
The Villa Arson x Université Côte d’Azur PhD program
Practice-based research in arts aims to establish the artistic project as a matrix for research, combining both analytical reflection and the production of artworks.
This doctoral program is aimed specifically at candidates displaying an original and innovative output in their chosen practical and theoretical fields, and also displaying a mastery of the theory, history and current stakes of art and the human and social sciences.
Above all the candidate must demonstrate a new and experimental approach to the creation and presentation of art, as well as ongoing research activity at master’s level or the equivalent. All forms of research are valid, however an interest in the Villa Arson’s specific areas of activity is required.
