In her works, Brunna Laboissière takes a particular interest in how the body and space interact, until one becomes a mirror of the other. Through two projects that she produced during the residency, the artist looks for the perceptions that can emerge from the interchange of the experience of people who come from “Southern countries”. The short film “Look Forward to our Independence”, co-directed with Bruna Carvalho Almeida, is a correspondence between the directors and a young girl they met during Harak in 2019, in Algiers. The feature-length film “Entre les temps” (Between Times) (in development) is research into the various facets of Paris: from the surface to its undergrounds that bear witness to the memories of the city and elsewhere.

The museums, zoo parks and gardens, highly complex apparatuses that shape the world we live in today, have never been more sacred and divine than their primordial prototypes. The planning approaches to parks is connected with the research on visualization of the osmosis between natural and man-made nature, yet how much is the natural in the artificial. The parks are designed between architecture and landscape and they are illustrated as a collaboration between the two, to form a mutual symbiosis. The work is built around the idea of the classification of the visible as the structural quality of photography, the photographs explore themes surrounding the creation, interpretation, and re-interpretation of reality, memory, and human experience, as well the impact of human beings on their surroundings. 

Making drawings (in progress), from palaeobotanical collections – fossils of the first plants, in particular the Carboniferous (between -350 and -300 million years) – from the Museu de Geociências (I.S.T.) in Lisbon and the Paris Natural History Museum, is part of the Anthropocene issue and incorporates sensitive questioning of humans’ relationship with plants, their history and status (denigrated) in contemporary western culture. The Carboniferous plants that have since been slumbering in the Earth, make up a part of fossil fuels today. They absorbed an excess of CO2 that was in the air, providing the conditions for animal life. This is the same CO2 we are releasing into the air today through combustion.

In contrast to the Modern paradigm, which separates the natural world from the human one in order to instrumentalize the former, pandemics has shown the relationship between human bodies, animals and the environment is one of continuities rather than ruptures, about identities, constant exchanges and symbiosis.  Now, when concepts such as collective immunity blur the boundaries between bodies, it’s necessary to see the planet as a shared organism with the inevitable sign of the Anthropocene. Therefore, I seek to identify the processes of deforestation with those of lung damages transmitted through the acceleration of global exchange -such as Covid19- through animations generated with satellite images of the Amazonian jungle. This is a work in progress for an installation that will make different relationships between anatomic and geographic studies. 

La cité des enfants perdus is a documentary theatre project that looks into the radicalisation of French and Belgian youngsters through the eyes of their mothers. Who are these young boys and girls? How did their lives look before they left their homes to Syria and other war-torn countries? How did they end up throwing themselves into a distorted cause rooted in blind hatred and violence? What promises were they given and what disillusionments did they experience? What can we do, as society, in order to ensure a more inclusive and hopeful future for tomorrow’s citizens? Drawing on the actual testimonies of mothers of radicalised youngsters, « La cité des enfants perdus » will bring on stage an ensemble of young performers to step in the trajectories of the “enfants perdus” and tell the story of ordinary children who could – possibly – have been our children? 

Les Cris du Silence is a project that aims to focus on two major capital cities: N’Djamena and Paris, via the view of young Chadian women. Invisible barriers, built on religious, economic and ethnic prejudices, bathe in the daily lives of citizens and particularly those of the most fragile. In France, in a strained economic context, the French population does not necessarily see the arrival of more of less legitimate migrants favourably. For these new arrivals, from varied horizons, the European Eldorado does not always keep its promises and they start dreaming of going back. Cultural and identity nostalgia invades those who do not manage to find their place and react constructively, up to experiencing severe depression sometimes.

"The act of drawing in writing is not to include black but to subtract light, to eliminate light" says Adrian Frutiger. The typefaces with which "History" has been dressed up have left some characters and their events and places, in the shadows. My research intends to focus on the history of the women who worked with these letters and who, even so, remained invisible, being deprived of their profession at different times. Based on this research, I will seek to create an experimental typography, taking the "counterforms" of the void of history and making them dialogue with the typographic voices of women, in the streets of today.

« I was writing screenplan and scouting locations for filming my new video Castles of the European Union. Focus of the video is artistic investigation of how much is existence of virtual world affected by the physical and historical conditions of the site and vice versa. To better access the topic, I designed a board for 35mm figures table top board game. Beside that I introduced public intervention into the building of Cité. Made public presentation of my artistbook Plane Dreams (Artmap2019) at La Maison de l’Ours, and in parallel having exhibition at Gallery Jocelyn Wolff resulting from the studio visit of the gallerist. »

One cat, six dogs & four angels is a fictional short story that revolves around the notion of loss and the ability to adapt  and cope with the idea of moving forward in this life, raising questions about  attachments. This story will explore how, we humans, in many circumstances are  incapable of detaching ourselves from our past. What is it the keeps brining us back?  Do we dwell in our own vulnerability? How do we process all these streams of  contradictive emotions in this fast paced lifestyle? How each one of us has a different  way in expressing? and mostly how do we move one? 

This research project resulted in a performance at the Cité internationale des arts, in collaboration with Anelisa Stuurman aka Annalyzer, Abo Gabi, Lisa Boostani, Babi Fontana, Wenke Schladitz, Sbusiso Gumede, Mona Varichon, Xabiso Vili, Victor Costa, Špela Volčič, Samira Saidi, Andreas Gogol. It was documented by five different cameras filming simultaneously during the performance. 

BENIMANA is a feature-length fiction film, the story of which takes place in 2012 following the Tutsi genocide in 1994. A time when the country came out of its silence to judge criminals in traditional trials: the victims’ word against that of their persecutor. This project is an attempt to understand the emotional and psychological fallout of older generations on the younger ones when stereotypes and hypotheses clash with reality, as well as the cost of the efforts to provide to coexist gain in a post-conflict era.

BARIKAD LANMOU is an account of recent history of the latest political events in Haiti. This project puts emphasis on affectivity and solidarity in places of claims and offers a few notes of erotism. “I took the decision to describe the reason for which popular militants are not afraid of giving their lives: love for their loved ones and love for their country. This project was produced with a bass guitar, saxophone, trumpet, and percussions that we made ourselves and my voice”. This album has 13 pieces of music.

Rodriguez develops a futuristic theatre play, named Dark City, which projects the viewer into the year 2200. There is no more money. Oxygen has become the new money where air has become rare. As it is, all the current problems cities are experiencing related to resource management, pollution and preserving the environment, have led politicians to make radical decisions on populations’ practices. It’s a dialogue between two characters that are asymmetric on all levels. One holds the right to life or death (because they have oxygen reserves), and the other is dispossessed of everything, other than their conscience of the drastic life conditions to which disadvantaged populations are confronted.

Philisa Zibi is a multidisciplinary artist who uses photography, jewellery and metal wovensculpture in her art practice. Her work explores sacred symbolism, geometry and the inquiry intoAfrican cosmologies is a significant part of her practice. The project pursued during her residencyat Cite international des arts explores the spiral symbol in nature which therefore expands on physics and the workings of the universe. Her work process engages both asymmetrical and symmetrical forms to examine mathematical patterns of order and chaos underlying the creation of physical objects. The visual representations are explorations of mythology, theories of blackness and invocations. Combining miniature metal objects and photography for her residency project allows for a conversation that explores African spiritual perspectives, colonial wound and the process of repair.