Villa Saint-Louis Ndar residency in partnership with Beaux-Arts de Paris
The Institut Français du Sénégal and the Beaux-Arts de Paris, with the support of the Friends of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, are offering young graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris a one-month research and creative residency starting in 2023 at the Villa Saint-Louis Ndar, the first French Villa in sub-Saharan Africa. This exceptional residency gives the winning artist the chance to develop their practice in a city listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A residency at the Villa Saint-Louis Ndar is an invaluable opportunity for creative exploration in a prestigious setting that attracts around a hundred artists from all disciplines, and to benefit from international visibility and the French cultural cooperation network.
Lucas Bouan Tsobgny is the 2023 winner of the Résidence Beaux-Arts de Paris - Villa Saint-Louis Ndar..
He will benefit from the Villa Ndar's network and facilities to develop an artistic project and offer outreach to a variety of audiences (local artists' collectives, amateur audiences, young people, schoolchildren, etc.).
This multi-disciplinary artist stands out for his sculptural and living works, in which the body and materials rub against each other and merge before breaking apart in ritualised movements. As a sculptor and performer, he orchestrates practices of ephemeral orthodoxy in which he dances organically and builds symbolic bridges that link multiple identities that are transfigured. The immediacy of movement, in an organic and sensitive way, propels the conventional into a whole new dimension and continually transforms it. Lucas Bouan Tsobgny's highly personal proposal won him a month's residency at the Villa Saint-Louis Ndar.
His project raises the organic questions around skin, moult and metamorphosis that run through his plastic and choreographic work. For Lucas Bouan Tsobgny, these themes embody a very strong sense of the current state of Africa, which is recovering from a colonial past whose impact is still evident in Saint Louis. His residency is an opportunity for him to create a new ritual that invokes and assembles gestures, forms and stories, both real and imagined, that he collects from Saint-Louisians. He pays particular attention to the Langue de Barbarie, and intends to go and meet the inhabitants of the fishing village of Guet-Ndar because he already senses the poetic and aesthetic power of their activity. He wants to capture their gestures and the movements of the fish, to understand the complexity of the relationship these people have with the sea and the rituals they adopt. This residency is also an opportunity to discover the memory inscribed in these bodies that nourishes this contemporary ritual.
