Elsa Brès, Living Underground, 2026. Courtesy of Elsa Brès / Elinka Films.
Installation view, Musée des Abattoirs – FRAC Occitanie, Elsa Brès: Listening to the Living, South Mezzanine, 2026. Courtesy of Elsa Brès / Elinka Films.
Elsa Brès, Living Underground, 2026. Courtesy of Elsa Brès / Elinka Films.
Elsa Brès, Living Underground, 2026. Courtesy of Elsa Brès / Elinka Films.
Installation view, Musée des Abattoirs – FRAC Occitanie, Elsa Brès: Listening to the Living, South Mezzanine, 2026. Courtesy of Elsa Brès / Elinka Films.
Elsa Brès, Living Underground, 2026. Courtesy of Elsa Brès / Elinka Films.
A History of Holes – 2026 ADAGP / Bétonsalon research and production grant
Elsa Brès
ADAGP – French Society of Authors in the Visual Arts and Bétonsalon – centre for art and research (Paris), in partnership with Kandinsky Library (Paris)
The artistic committee of the ADAGP–Bétonsalon Grant met on 9 June 2026 and selected Elsa Brès as this year’s recipient. She is the ninth artist to receive the grant, following Franck Leibovici (2017), Liv Sculman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir (2022), le duo Irma Name (2023), Florian Fouché (2024) et No Anger (2025).
The ADAGP–Bétonsalon Research Grant is an award of €15,000 intended to support an artist undertaking a research project over several months. Bétonsalon will accompany Elsa Brès throughout the research and production process. The artist receives a €4,000 fee and €8,000 towards production costs.
The artistic project
A History of Holes
A History of Holes explores the rural underground worlds on whose edges Elsa Brès lives, as well as the stories that inhabit them, with the aim of opening up minoritarian perspectives on History through collective storytelling practices. Natural and excavated underground cavities emerge as spaces where temporalities, species, and forms of life become entangled. The project will be informed by research into the archives of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a Mexican collective founded in 1937 whose practices intersect political struggles, rural cultures, and popular narratives. A History of Holes shares with these practices a concern for the circulation of stories, their material forms, and their capacity to create common spaces.
Beneath the limestone plateau of the Causses lies a vast network of caves, sinkholes, cavities, and galleries. These places have been crossed, inhabited, or shaped by a multitude of lives: resistant peasants, heretical communities, hidden populations, dissident practices, and other seemingly vanished worlds. Rather than distinguishing fact from legend or rumour, the project seeks to collectively explore what their coexistence produces: a dense, stratified temporality in which different times and forms of presence persist and may continue to act together.
In contrast to narratives based on rootedness and continuity, A History of Holes approaches territory through its depth and complexity. The land is no longer understood as a stable surface but as an assemblage of layers, circulations, and intertwined genealogies. Holes may become spaces of the commons, capable of unsettling identity-based narratives and opening up alternative political imaginaries.
The project is grounded in fieldwork conducted in the Cévennes region, including the collection of stories, meetings and conversations, historical research, underground explorations, and the development of collective storytelling and speculative narrative practices. These materials and investigations will inform a moving-image practice shaped by collective staging and attentive to ways of embodying narratives capable of opening up alternative relationships to the present beneath the surface of official histories.
Elsa Brès
Elsa Brès is an artist and filmmaker based in the Cévennes (France). She develops long-term, research-based projects through a hybrid and collaborative practice that spans film and installation. Rooted in fieldwork, her approach explores how landscapes are shaped by ecological and political histories of exploitation, property, and resistance, as well as by non-human life. Blending observation, narratives, and experimentation, she creates poetic yet critical visions of coexistence between species, communities, and environments.
Her recent solo presentations include : La Loge Brussels (2023), Château d’Assas (2023), State of Concept Athens (2022), transmediale Berlin (2021). Her recent and up-coming exhibitions and screenings include: Fondation Pernod Ricard, Radius CCA, Cinéma du Réel, FID Marseille, La Capella Barcelona, transmediale, Vdrome, Cincinnati Contemporary art center, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, MO.CO Panacée, Tënk, CRAC Occitanie, LOOP Barcelona, Palais de Tokyo, among others. Her work has been supported by grants from CNAP, CNC, DRAC Occitanie, Mécènes du Sud, Art Situacions, Tënk x Mediapart. She is the laureate of the Sciences-Po Prize for contemporary art in 2024. She is an active member of Elinka films production collective, Forêts Queer screening sessions and Coudoulous space for cinema.
ADAGP
Created in 1953, ADAGP is the French royalty collecting and distribution society. It intervenes in the field of graphic and visual arts.
Supported by a global network of almost 55 sister companies, it currently represents more than 260,000 artists in all disciplines of visual arts: painting, sculpting, photography, architecture, design, comic strips, manga, illustrating, street art, digital creation, video art, etc.
In addition, ADAGP encourages the artistic scene by initiating and providing financial support for projects designed to stimulate and enhance creative activity, and to promote it nationally and internationally.
The Kandinsky Library, the documentation and research center of the National Museum of Modern Art – Center for Industrial Creation, preserves and provides access to extensive archival holdings and documentary collections dedicated to 20th- and 21st-century art. Serving researchers and art professionals, it houses nearly 300 archival collections and more than 13,000 artist files, a selection of which can be consulted online at:
The 2026 Artistic committee
Anne Bourse, artist and member of ADAGP
Mica Gherghescu, curator and Head of Research and Scientific Programming, Kandinsky Library – Centre Pompidou
Oulimata Gueye, curator and professor at the National School of Fine Arts of Lyon (ENSBA Lyon)
Émilie Renard, Director of Bétonsalon
The ADAGP/Bétonsalon research and Production grant
This research grant supports artists whose work explores questions of image representation, production, and circulation through the study of archival collections. For its ninth edition, the grant will enable Elsa Brès to undertake a research and production project based on the Taller de Gráfica Popular archives held by the Kandinsky Library.
The resulting work will be presented in a solo exhibition at Bétonsalon during the first half of 2028.
