Alexia Venot is a French artist and designer based in Paris. She graduated from EnSAD Paris, with a background in Research & Creation, and works in a transdisciplinary approach using mixed media.
She questions our relationship to the living, through homage, collaboration and transmission; through universal and intimate subjects such as memory, exils, eroticism, birth and death, as well as collective narratives to face contemporary crises.
Alexia Venot sets up relational and performative spaces, environments where interspecific interactions are played out through the exploration and transformation of matter, advocating an inclusive approach. Through a reflexive and situated practice, and in particular of textiles and materials, she is interested in the role of materiality in responding to environmental and societal issues. Her work has been exhibited in Paris, Aarhus, London, Basel, HCMC and shehas participated in several research programs and has taught and lectured design in schools and universities. In 2022, She was a laureate of Villa Saigon,Vietnam.
HAY & HUSK
Hay & Husk intends to create materials from renewable resources while developing a narrative in resonance with the Camargue territory. Hay & Husk is a research-creation project initiated in 2017. With the Camargue as its terrain, this project consisted of exploring solutions to mitigate the burning of rice straws (at a rate of 75,000 tons per year), and the consequences they entail (smoke release, accident, global warming) by exploring materials and textiles from the residues of rice farming. Through fieldwork and the meeting of artisans, laboratories and farmers, this project
also aimed to identify old and new knowledge in order to set up a lexicon of materials in relation to the landscape and local resources.
Firstly this project is an exploration of the material situated, but it is also a place of a reflection around the notion of heritage, of inheritance and of natural reserve. The Camargue also has an intensive industrial activity, a complex pitfall where the old dualities and the diversity of ecologies at work on the territory can be questioned.
TINZALINE
The Moroccan carpet craft is now facing a growing demand for decoration, the traditional ‘Beni Ouarain’ is declined and reproduced to meet Western trends and standards. In the Anti-Atlas desert, more traditional forms of carpet making persist (Berber), where the activity represents an additional income to agriculture and is practised by craftswomen according to a matriarchal transmission. Relational space, place of transmission, the Moroccan Berber carpet traditionally accompanies the stages of a woman’s life Centred by the sharing of stories, I was invited to propose a work in collaboration with craftswomen, a textile, as a tribute to weavers.
The drawing was born from conversations and imaginations around weaving, from stories and evocative objects, we wove a dialogue around our relationship to weaving: as women, mothers or daughters, our relationship to textiles. The project lasted several weeks, during which I lived with the artisans, we shared the daily tasks and progress of the textile. The carpet for several months became the space of our relationships, of our shared stories, of the stories of each one and also a place with a strong spiritual dimension.
VIVANTES
This project brought together students, researchers, artists, witches, botanists mediators around the question of the living in the city in the frame of the European project ‘4cs : from conflict to conviviality through creativity and culture’ at EnSAD Paris to answer the following question: “how to reappropriate the city by the living ?“As a response to very restrictive sanitary rules and successive periods of lockdown and isolation, the project embodies other forms of reconnection to the living and proposes another history of care. Care is then thought according to an ecofeminist point of view, where cohabitation, transmission and spirituality reveal other points of view, from the well-foundedness of medicinal plants, to care approaches, as well as the roles of bacteria for our organism. At the same time as a symposiumt is a performative bar where cultures of kombucha cohabit with macerations of invasive medicinal and local plants, like stories, forgotten mythologies, where women, healers, become the spokespersons of ancestral knowledge for a feminine transmission of the ancestral knowledge for a feminist transmission of care.
EGGS AND BOOBS
We eat and we are eaten. How to approach this ambiguous relationship to bodies to reinvent forms of sensuality with food?
‘We are eggs forever.
It is our destiny to be eggs.
Being eggs forever means not having a precise identity.
It means hatching a power, a virtuality, an indecision that must be kept as such. Forever.’
Emanuele Coccia for Eggs and Boobs.
The performance takes the form of a performative and participative dinner, Emanuele Coccia as one of the characters of the introduced fiction.
In Eggies Island, the audience is taken on a culinary journey where they immerse themselves in the role of the Bowies, characters of the story, who come to have a meal on the island. A series of different dishes and orders are brought to the public, metaphorical ingredients of our sensual, regressive, erotic and fluid connections: eggs, milk, eggplant, fig, rice, seaweed.The diner invites us to rethink through fiction new forms of eroticism, in which during the performance the audience embodies fluid living beings, neither really man or woman or hermaphrodite, of other species, encouraging the possibilities of other relationships.
MAKING ROOM(S) FOR OUR GHOSTS
This piece is a result of an Art Residence in Villa Saigon, French Institute. This installation is the result of several years of research on the question of homage in public space, in order to bring together stories of exile and the disappearance of certain plants, but also the non-recognition of know-how. A memorial installation in homage to the Indochinese workers ’Công Binh’, who came to initiate rice growing in Camargue. It recounts through a textile immersion, the forgotten memory of men who came to participate in the war effort after a forced exile in the Vaucluse between 1939 and 1952. This tragic history, long absent and forgotten from the spaces of commemoration, intends here to give voice to the disappeared, through textile itineraries, the reconstruction of images, to reweave a common history. Through a work of assembling crossed narratives, Alexia Venot’s proposal questions the border and episodes of history under the prism of entanglements and transparencies, stratified and non-linear moments that invite us to gather collective narratives, weave intimate stories, carried by the narration of archives, in movement, but also of plants, when the roots tell of the exiles.
Art Residency: Alexia Venot Laureate of the Villa Saigon residency programme of the French Institute of 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.
