Sylvain Lizon, director of the EPA Villa Arson, is pleased to announce the appointment of Marie-Ann Yemsi as the director of the Villa Arson art center.
This decision was made by a selection committee composed of representatives from the DGCA (General Directorate of Artistic Creation), DRAC PACA, two qualified personalities from higher art schools and art centers, and the institution’s management.
Marie-Ann Yemsi will take up her position from September 4th. She succeeds Éric Mangion, who held this position from 2006 to 2023 before joining the Frac Occitanie in Montpellier as director.
The project led by Marie-Ann Yemsi for the Villa Arson art center is developed under the name “Creating World(s)”, in the sense of “reaffirming the place of art as an essential and common good”, which she specifies as:
- Creating World(s) by fully engaging with artists to deploy the collective nature of the emergence of any work of art and the ideas that inspire it.
- Creating World(s) to invite encounters with and around their artistic, poetic, and free gestures, to offer other points of view on history and contemporary realities, and thus open new and emancipatory perspectives for understanding the world.
- Creating World(s) through the effective implementation of hospitality and inclusivity practices: reaching, including, and representing the diversity of people to whom the institution addresses, as well as developing its social and innovative role in terms of cultural rights.
Thus, through this project, Marie-Ann Yemsi wishes to reactivate and reinterpret the pioneering spirit and singular approach of Villa Arson by affirming the importance of utopian acts at the heart of its history and missions.
“Also a driving force in student training, the Villa Arson art center contributes to the internationalization of the institution, particularly in close articulation with the residency center. It also plays a central role in the development of new paths combining artistic education, research, and curatorial practices,” recalls Sylvain Lizon. “At this pivotal moment 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 levels. As a full-fledged actor in Nice’s very dense and dynamic cultural network, it will thus continue active collaborations with various structures at the intersection of disciplines. Conducting its action in line with the expectations of the Contemporary Art Center of National Interest label, the art center will continue to implement sustained and innovative action in favor of audiences, attentive to their diversity.”
“The ambition of Creating World(s) is to create the conditions for an intense proximity to creation for all and to propose, through the gestures of artists, new intelligibilities of the world,” specifies Marie-Ann Yemsi.
Marie-Ann Yemsi, French of German and Cameroonian origin, is an independent exhibition curator and contemporary art consultant based in Paris (France). With a degree in political science, she pays particular attention to theoretical, critical, and aesthetic productions from 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 connection with the political, social, and ecological issues of today’s world. In 2005, she founded Agent Créatif(s), a cultural production workshop and contemporary art consultancy oriented towards promoting emerging artists from the African continent and diasporas. She has curated numerous international exhibitions including African Odysseys at Brass in Brussels in 2015, The Day That Comes at Galerie des Galeries in Paris in 2017, A Silent Lines, Lives Here in 2018 and Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream in late 2021-2022 at 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 the Artistic Director of Afrotopia, the 11th edition of Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography (December 2017 – January 2018) and will curate the 19th edition of MOMENTA Biennale de l’image to be held in Montreal in the fall of 2025. As a recipient of the Villa Albertine residency program, she will conduct a research project in the United States in early 2025.