Alexia Venot is a French artist and designer based in Paris. She graduated from EnSAD Paris, where she continued her studies in Research & Creation, working in a transdisciplinary way with mixed media. Through an experimental approach, she questions our relationship with the living being by invoking ancestral, marginalised or more innovative knowledge. Alexia Venot sets up spaces of resilience, zones of contact, where interspecific interactions, exploration and transformation of matter are played out from an inclusive and feminist perspective. A reflexive situated practice guides her work, which is focused on textiles and materials. She is also interested in the role of materiality in addressing environmental and social issues. Her work has been exhibited in Paris, Aarhus, London, Basel, and Ho–Chi Minh. In 2022, she was awarded a residency from the Villa Saigon in Vietnam.
In this interview, Alexia tells us about her experience in Vietnam, as a resident and her reflections carried out there around the memory of past episodes and mourning, materialiazed by a textile installation.
Sylwia Krasoń: How did you find out about the residency programme?
Alexia Venot: The residencies in the Villa Saigon in Vietnam are proposed by the French Institute. For me, this destination was an obvious choice as Vietnam is intimately connected with a project I have been carrying out since 2017. I simply sent my proposal to an open call. I had the chance to be selected, it was two years ago, just before the Covid-19 pandemic. I was supposed to come earlier, but finally, I was able to do it two years later. I had more time to think carefully and prepare myself before the trip.
SK: What captivated you the most in Ho – Chi Minh?
AV: It is a city with many facets. There are layers of cultures and styles that echo a complex and violent history of the place… What captivated me in the city is the free space left to the inhabitants, for example, the corners of the streets, where it is possible to stop. Everything happens there outside, day and night. I have also been marked by buildings that tell the story of the past, the stratifications of the architecture reflecting eras; therefore, it is possible to identify different places announcing various historical stages. Some abandoned places, such as houses, are still haunted by ghosts of the past. This city is, for me, like a phoenix that gives strength and is in perpetual rebirth.
SK: Did you know what you want to do during your stay? Or have you decided on situ?
AV: I did research before leaving: talking with researchers and compiling a bibliography. I was inspired by Vincianne Despret ’s book “Aux bonheur des morts” (“Our Grateful Dead” (2015) and Henonik Kwon’s “Ghosts of war in Vietnam” (2012). They are both working on the agency between death and life from a European and an Asian point of view. When we think about Memory in the art field, the name that jumps to my mind is Christian Boltanski. I was astonished that he was very present during my residency. It was as if Boltanski’s ghost had invited himself to my residence. Much to my surprise, I learned that one of my roommates, Keita Mori, also a resident at the Villa, had been his student for years at l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Paris. My work has been long in preparation, but has evolved over time. We, artists, have to adapt to a new context, and what we imagine at the beginning is sometimes fantasy and it happens to be inconsistent with what we discover on the spot.
SK: Tell us about the project you worked on during your stay.
AV: It was a complex work over several years. This project was very contextual, but it underlies other questions about life after death and the possibility of giving art spaces an almost sacred dimension for mourning… A tribute to Vietnamese workers who came to initiate rice cultivation in France in the Camargue and participated in the war effort in the ’50s. History has long been silent on this story and it was important to me to accentuate this episode and, more generally, to work on issues related to cycles of resilience and a living space to commemorate. How to reconstitute the past through the trace, the imprint, the unconscious and the archive? How can the heroes of a personal and collective history exist through homage? I have been heavily influenced by Vinciane Despret, for whom remembering is not simply a simple act of memory, but it is also an act of creation, a story to be re-made, to be re-composed. The loss of a loved one, the remains of humans to honor, the end of a cycle.
SK: What does your regular art residency day look like?
AV: Each day was different, and so were the weeks. The first phase was to find the (textiles and raw materials, such as straws, flowers, and plants), but also producers and partnerships. A regular day corresponds to a lot of back and forth between theoretical reflections, being in the field exploring the city and finding connections that can also reason with the subject matter, exploring the city, places of mourning, in-between spaces, and sharing the discussion with my roommate, Quentin Sponh. It was quite interesting to see that our stories became intertwined, he was on a family quest around his past, and all of this brought out connections that didn’t exist before. Then came the production, where I would spend days weaving, assembling my references, as if texts and History could be weaved together. My creative process is part of a relationship between works and people with whom I have been able to dialogue, such as researchers, artists, and weavers, but also to seek contact with the disappeared, to read testimonies, to awaken and take care of the ghosts.
SK: Does the change of context help you in the creation process?
AV: A lot. I work on-site, in situ.The context is critical to me. For example, during my stay, I met Đức Minh Tran, whose work is questioning Vietnamese North-South migration. We realised that t our questions and formats were similar, so we presented an installation together, and we will think about further collaborations when back in Paris. Considering our common past, we decided to create a dialogue between our works. At the end of my residency, we organised an evening where we both presented our works: “ making the room(s) for our ghosts” and “Reunification flowers” . It was like a collage of two shows….. Everything coincided: our personal stories and the space. It was fluid to work with Đức. I think my work was also moving even on the stage curation process: my work is always the fact of an association, making dialogue of stories, materials and living beings. I find that the solo show does not make much sense nowadays; we are always surrounded by several realities at the same time…
My final installation is a textile work of assemblages, weavings, and images of crossed narratives to question the border and episodes of history. I explored under the prism of transparencies, stratified, non-linear fragments that invite us to gather collective narratives, to weave intimate stories, carried by the narrations of archives and plants, the roots tell the exiles.
The work is also evolving toward the context and meetings… And also, it was essential to change a point of view. The idea of resilience is quite strong in Vietnam, where death is also part of daily life, and it’s continuing; life is everywhere, and we never really die. It was enriching to discuss these questions without any filter, whereas in Europe, especially in France, Death is such a taboo…
SK: Do you emphasise your work or rather on meeting people and exploring the city/ area?
AV: Meeting people and exchanging ideas is significant to me. It is through the story, the discussion, and the confrontation of ideas that I make my practice evolve. Discussing with local artists was also very enriching to take distance. But also to meet people from all over the world and to work with collectives, like Mot+++, a dynamic artist-run space here in HCMC.
SK: What challenges and opportunities did the Residency in Vietnam involve?
AV: To find your bearings, to be independent. It allows them to be integrated into an interesting fabric of artists locally and to discover the city through this network.
SK: Name three objects which are the most important to you during the Residency.
AV: My phone (for translation), scooters (essential to drive in Vietnam ) and a textile I bought on a trip. It was a key object. I purchased it from Weavers here, and it made me realise both how the textile is such a language and allows us to tell stories and also to grasp the issues related to the loss of territory.
SK: What is the role of an institution in your residency? What does it provide you with? What would you recommend to artists going abroad for a residency ?
AV: The role of the residency is to give us access to important addresses and recommended spaces to facilitate our work there and, finally, to help us with our final exhibition and promotion.
The program gives us access to housing and a grant and puts us in contact with and advises us to set up our careers. I would recommend that artists explore and take part in residency programmes. All creative people need to change their perspective and gain some distance from their artistic network, have new inquiries. The questions asked by Parisian artists are not the same. I also realised that, in Europe, we were romantic: obsessed with the past, and a bit afraid of the future.
Here you will find important information about art residences in Villa Saigon.
https://www.facebook.com/VillaSaigon.residence.de.creation/
https://www.institutfrancais.com/fr/institut-francais/offre/villa-saigon
