Licia Demuro

Winner 24-25

Licia Demuro, curator and art critic, is the recipient of the 2024–25 curatorial research residency at ÉSADHAR.  Her curatorial practice has led her to develop research focused on the formal, conceptual, and social repercussions of the productivist model in the field of art. Through her projects, she has explored artistic practices based on protocols and instructions, low-tech approaches, and other forms of collective work.

In 2021, she contributed to the creation of Octopus – Coopérative de travailleur(ses) de l’art, where she became an associate curator. In 2023, she began a collaboration with the weekly supplement of Le Quotidien de l’Art, for which she produced a series of investigations on topics at the intersection of artistic and societal issues. In 2024, she joined the curatorial committee of the 68th Salon de Montrouge, which will take place in February 2025. During her year-long research residency in curatorial practices at ÉSADHAR, she plans to examine and cultivate the notion of the commons through the creative act. To do so, she will draw on the living, social, poetic, and economic ecosystem unique to the region to explore the power of narrative in shaping collective action. The aim will be to ask: how does narrative allow situations of emancipation to take shape and endure? And how can art contribute to this? Her research will therefore focus on exploring the possibility of “telling a story” by “creating a work,” and vice versa. The ambition to narrate the “commons”—while caring for them—and thus to ensure their lasting presence in the collective imagination will rest on attempts to weave together the words, gestures, dreams, and knowledge that inhabit these places. These attempts may take the form of exploratory investigations into the relationships and interdependencies present within the neighborhood, as well as choreographed debates, close readings (in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of close reading), walks and surveys in peri-urban settings, gatherings, correspondences, and other messages inscribed in public space.

In short, the fundamental focus of this research will rest primarily on the idea borrowed from Tim Ingold of “setting out on a journey with what one seeks to know,” allowing a group’s actions to merge with its own narrative, so as to “shift the modern notion that knowledge should be produced in a detached manner.” In this sense, the aim will be to collectively imagine new forms of creative epistemologies, translating endogenous resources and relationships into spatialized, open, fluid, and plural narratives.  The curatorial practices research residency is a partnership between the École supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen, the C-E-A (French Association of Curators), and the Centre André-Malraux, with support from the DRAC Normandie and the City of Rouen.

Putting Down Roots

At a time when the cultural industry is confronting the limits of “infinite development in a finite world” (Bernard Charbonneau), curator-in-residence Licia Demuro explores how the principles of degrowth influence contemporary artistic practices. These reflections examine production processes, the origin of materials, and the impact of creative acts, prompting a return to ancient techniques and artisanal know-how. They also encourage the creation of tools from local resources, in a spirit of “rooting in daily life” (Geneviève Pruvost).

The Mettre racine project thus proposed approaching the creation of colors, papers, and media as an aesthetic endeavor in its own right, highlighting processes rendered invisible by industrialization and revealing their poetic and social potential. This approach involves paying attention to natural commons and how they are managed. At La Grand’Mare, the urban forest and plant waste from green spaces and the CFA Simone Veil served as the terrain for this exploration.

Artists François Génot, Albane Hupin, and Christelle Enault led workshops bringing together residents and students, transforming their practices into moments of collective creation and producing “tool-works” that anyone could use. The residency concluded with the Micro Drawing Festival, conceived by Marie Glaize and Louis Clais, where these tools were tested by the public.