Mawena Yehouessi is the first practice-based PhD candidate in the arts within the program developed by Villa Arson and Université Côte d’Azur (2019–2024).
On Thursday, December 12, 2024, Mawena Yehouessi defended her dissertation entitled “Afrofuturist Poïetics: Working the Weave at the Intersection of Collage and Curation” at Villa Arson.
Mawena Yehouessi
Born in 1990 in Cotonou (Benin), Mawena Yehouessi describes herself as a “collisionist” — at once curator, researcher, and artist.
Founder of the collective Black(s) to the Future, she lives and works between Nice and Paris (France). Drifting through alter-futurisms and poïethics, Mawena Yehouessi develops an imploring, collage-based, collaborative and forward-looking practice where space and time collide | oppose | reverse.
With a background in literature, philosophy, cultural project management, and contemporary dance, Mawena Yehouessi belongs to a generation of the unclassifiable / declassified — whose realities, practices, worlds, and “professions” unfold through a series of slashes, commons, and displacements.
The thesis
Recombining and wagering in turn (on) a set of speculative, artistic, and collective practices — all drawn from survival strategies and so-called “minoritarian” necessities — Mawena Yehouessi does not seek to establish or decode new methods, knowledges, or theories of art, but rather to make them a tangible, shared, and embodied experience.
She does so in space-times where co-existence is synonymous with co-creation.
By intertwining Afrofuturism and Black studies, artistic/curatorial practices, writing/translation, and teaching/research, she invites — notably through at least three distinct projects — a plurality of practitioners and friends to co-compose situations of antagonism and sharing, celebration and defeat, rage, labor, care, and tenderness:
– a film/series, Sol in the Dark
– a choreographic installation, NSNAMDLM
– an exhibition with workshops, to “The Fire Next Time”
Direction
ean François Trubert, Professor of Musicology, Université Côte d’Azur
Sophie Orlando, Professor of Art Theory, Villa Arson
Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Professor of Philosophy at Paris 8 and now Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU
The Villa Arson × Université Côte d’Azur Doctoral Program
Research by project in the arts aims to conceive the artistic project as a matrix for research, combining analytical reflection with artistic production.
This doctoral program is explicitly intended for candidates who demonstrate original and innovative work within their field of artistic expression and theoretical research, with a solid understanding of art theories, history, contemporary art, and the humanities and social sciences.
The selected candidate notably demonstrates a new and experimental approach in the domain of artistic creation and its presentation, as well as ongoing research activity (evidenced by supervised work at the master’s level or equivalent). Any research focus is accepted; however, candidates are expected to show particular interest in the areas of activity and specificities of the Villa Arson.
