Virginie Bobin

Winner 23-24

Virginie Bobin is the 2023–24 recipient of the first Grand’Mare residency, a research residency focused on curatorial practices. This project is a partnership between the École supérieure d’art et design Le Havre-Rouen, C-E-A (the French Association of Curators), and the Centre André-Malraux, with support from the DRAC Normandie and the City of Rouen.

Virginie Bobin often works collaboratively, at the intersection of research, curatorial and editorial practices, pedagogy, and translation. In 2023, she earned a PhD in research-creation through the PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with a dissertation on the political and affective stakes of translation in postcolonial France. In 2018, she co-founded with Victorine Grataloup the editorial and curatorial platform Qalqalah قلقلة, now composed of six people, dedicated to the production, translation, and dissemination of artistic and theoretical research in French, Arabic, and English www.qalqalah.org. With Qalqalah قلقلة, she co-organized two exhibitions at CRAC Occitanie (Sète) and La Kunsthalle (Mulhouse), as well as numerous seminars and workshops at Tanzquartier (Vienna), Buda (Kortrijk), L’atelier de l’Observatoire (Casablanca), exerce (Montpellier), and online. At the same time, she maintains an ongoing dialogue with artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, which resulted in a three-part exhibition presented at CentroCentro (Madrid), the Museion (Bolzano), and the CAC Brétigny in 2019–2021, as well as a publication
(K-Verlag, 2023).

Previously, she was Program Director at Villa Vassilieff, a venue for residencies, research, and exhibitions that she co-founded in 2016 in Paris. She has worked for Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Manifesta Journal, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, and Performa, the New York Performance Biennial. In addition to her contributions to various international journals, she has edited two anthologies: *Composing Differences* (Les Presses du Réel, 2015) and *Re-publications* (in collaboration with Mathilde Villeneuve, Archive Books, 2015).

Curatorial Residency “Working With”

“Doing with, or doing thanks to others, and at the risk of others”: these words by philosopher Isabelle Stengers offer a possible methodology for collectively recreating desirable worlds based on care, encounter, and attention to others. It was with these words in mind that curator Virginie Bobin conceived her curatorial research residency at Esadhar, whose goal is to build bridges between the art school and the Grand-Mare neighborhood where it is located, its residents, and its many cultural and community organizations. After several weeks of fieldwork, observation, and meetings conducted with art school students and with the support of the André Malraux Cultural Center (a project partner), a focus gradually emerged: food and its social, political, economic, and emotional dimensions, which form the link between the history of the Grand-Mare neighborhood (and the subsistence farm that gave it its name) and the daily concerns of its stakeholders (students, residents, associations, community gardens, a social integration restaurant, a honey farm, a culinary vocational school, etc.) The format of the recipe (a score, an object of transmission) becomes a pretext for encounters, collaborations, and creations within the school and the neighborhood, following in the footsteps of artists who have made food and cooking their field and their practice.