Irma Name. Winners of the ADAGP & Bétonsalon 2023 grant

The artistic com­mittee of the ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant met on 22 May 2023 and chose the duo Irma Name (Hélène Déléan and Clément Caignart) as the lau­re­ates. They are the sixth artists to ben­efit from this grant after Franck Leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019), Anne Le Troter (2021) and Abdessamad El Montassir (2022).

The ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant is an endow­ment of €20,000 intended to sup­port an artist in a research pro­ject over sev­eral months. Bétonsalon – center for art and research sup­ports the artist in the research and pro­duc­tion pro­cess. The artist receives €5,000 in fees and €10,000 for pro­duc­tion.

The artistic pro­ject : ENTRE AUTRES CHOSES or BOT (BETWEEN OTHER THINGS)

Working from the archives of the Archizoom Associati col­lec­tive, Irma Name looks at the notion of crit­ical counter-utopia devel­oped by this group of Florentine archi­tects and designers between 1966 and 1974.

Archizoom devel­oped the No-Stop City pro­ject (1969), a model of global urban­i­sa­tion based on the organ­i­sa­tion of a fac­tory or super­market, which ques­tions the rel­e­vance of a world sat­u­rated with objects and pro­poses a new rela­tion­ship with space eman­ci­pated from all geo­metric ref­er­ence points. Their last pro­ject, a short-lived coop­er­a­tive of archi­tects and artists enti­tled Global Tools (1973-1975), was a counter-school of archi­tec­ture based on the use of nat­ural and arti­fi­cial mate­rials and the devel­op­ment of indi­vidual cre­ative activ­i­ties. The mem­bers of Archizoom saw the space of trans­mis­sion as the first stone in the con­struc­tion of a polit­ical ges­ture.

With the starting point that the utopias and counter-utopias of the 1970s are being re-exam­ined in the form of techno-utopias, where insti­tu­tions that have become depen­dent on the dig­ital are grad­u­ally migrating towards meta­verses, Irma Name will be devel­oping the BOT (Between Other Things) pro­ject during this research and pro­duc­tion res­i­dency. Assuming that the archive of an artistic and edu­ca­tional exper­i­ment con­ducted by Bétonsalon has dis­ap­peared, they are imag­ining a group of researchers and artists com­mis­sioned to recon­struct this his­tory and its missing ele­ments, by recon­sti­tuting the sen­sory envi­ron­ment of the site. Urban plan­ners, soci­ol­o­gists, activists, stu­dents and artists will come together in a fic­tional field study, in the style of an antic­i­pa­tion story. There will be ten­sion as they attempt to recreate a new immer­sive artistic expe­ri­ence inspired by the pre­vious one.
This research will result in the pro­duc­tion of a video instal­la­tion that will ques­tion the new methods of pro­duc­tion and cir­cu­la­tion of artistic con­tent in vir­tual and com­pu­ta­tional worlds. It will engage with the issues, fan­tasies and fears linked to the inex­orable devel­op­ment of vir­tual reality tech­nolo­gies, so-called arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and gen­er­a­tive agents in a near-future fic­tional world.

Irma Name, Datation1, 2023, photographic document. Courtesy and photo : Irma Name.

Irma Name, Datation1, 2023, photographic document. Courtesy and photo : Irma Name.

IRMA NAME
(Hélène Déléan and Clément Caignart),
Laureates of the 2023 ADAGP / Bétonsalon Grant

Born in 1986 and 1987, work in Paris

Since 2016, the duo Irma Name (Hélène Deléan and Clément Caignart) has been set­ting up col­lec­tive or par­tic­i­pa­tory pro­jects, ques­tioning the ambiguous role of pol­i­tics and ped­a­gogy in their artistic prac­tice, as in art in gen­eral. Because col­lab­o­ra­tion and impro­vi­sa­tion are at the heart of pro­duc­tion methods in film, the­atre and per­for­mance, Irma Name sees these dif­ferent mediums as priv­i­leged tools for giving shape to their spec­u­la­tive nar­ra­tives. It could also be a ques­tion of going beyond an indi­vidual, auc­to­rial con­cep­tion in favour of an unfolding of the work from a form thought out by sev­eral, inspiring and in tune with what reality demands.

With par­odic seri­ous­ness, their work uses the codes of the soci­o­log­ical survey, the par­tic­i­pa­tory work­shop or the antic­i­pa­tion film, enabling them to for­malise orally and pro­ject into nar­ra­tives the socio-polit­ical and cul­tural ques­tions that urgently need answers... The artists’ interest in doc­u­men­tary film, archives (and the images that emerge from them), exper­i­mental the­atre (in its eman­ci­pa­tory vein), crit­ical theory and the social sciences all inter­mingle to pro­duce pro­posals that, while visu­ally rich and eru­dite, are nonethe­less highly effec­tive the­o­ret­i­cally, without excluding the fun and plea­sure that went into their pro­duc­tion.

Based on sit­u­ated prac­tices and knowl­edge, to use Donna Haraway’s terms, Irma Name’s cre­ations reflect on the way in which events interact and cir­cu­late in a vast ecosystem, tran­scending the human and binary ide­olo­gies. Although the duo’s artistic prac­tice is part of an ongoing reflec­tion on the earth’s eco­log­ical future, the ways in which raw mate­rials are extracted and trans­ported, access to energy and tech­nology, the growing role of the ser­vice sector in the economy and exploita­tion at work, etc., their involve­ment never descends into pre­sump­tuous activism, and allows for the pos­si­bility - and even the impor­tance - of an artistic per­spec­tive on a changing society, in which artists also have a role to play.

Their work has been shown at the CAC du Parc St-Léger, Glassbox and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2022, they directed their first film, Rois d’Asile, as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires pro­gramme.

(Presentation of the work by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle)

Irma Name, Cloud and Coal, 2021, performance. Courtesy Irma Name. Photo : La synagogue de Delme, 2021.

Artistic com­mitee 2023

Julien Ribeiro, artist and curator
Lauren Tortil, artist affil­i­ated to ADAGP
Abdessamad El Montassir, artist, lau­reate of the 2022 grant
Mica Gherghescu, head of research and sci­en­tific pro­grams, Bibliothèque Kandinsky
Émilie Renard, director of Bétonsalon

The ADAGP / Bétonsalon research and pro­duc­tion grant

This grant is intended to allow an artist to develop a research pro­ject over sev­eral months on ques­tions of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, pro­duc­tion and cir­cu­la­tion of images, based on one or more pho­to­graphic col­lec­tions of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky that they can iden­tify. These reflec­tions can belong to the field of art - rereading of art his­to­ries, explo­ration of ignored and marginal­ized life paths, com­po­si­tion of new artistic lin­eages, etc. - but also in the very mate­ri­ality of pho­to­graphic images - their making, archiving, repro­duc­tion, exhi­bi­tion and mul­tiple forms of cir­cu­la­tion.

About ADAGP

Created in 1953, ADAGP is the French roy­alty col­lecting and dis­tri­bu­tion society in the field of graphic and visual arts.
Supported by a global net­work of almost 50 sister com­pa­nies, it cur­rently rep­re­sents more than 110 000 artists in all dis­ci­plines of visual arts: painting, sculpting, pho­tog­raphy, archi­tec­ture, design, comic strips, manga, illus­trating, street art, dig­ital cre­ation, video art, etc.
ADAGP man­ages all the prop­erty rights held by artists (resale right, repro­duc­tion right, right of public com­mu­ni­ca­tion, col­lec­tive rights), for all modes of use: books, media, adver­tising, mer­chan­dise, auc­tions, gallery sales, tele­vi­sion, video on demand, web­sites, user sharing plat­forms and so on.
Thanks to its rich, diverse cat­a­logue, it is now one of the biggest col­lecting soci­eties in the world.
www.adagp.fr

About Bibliothèque Kandinsky

The Kandinsky Library, doc­u­men­ta­tion and research center of the Musée National d’art Moderne - Centre de Création Industrielle at the Centre Pompidou, pre­serves and makes avail­able to a spe­cial­ized audi­ence impor­tant archives and doc­u­men­tary col­lec­tions on 20th and 21st cen­tury art.
The Kandinsky Library holds almost 220 archives and 13,000 artists’ files, some of which can be con­sulted online on the Centre Pompidou’s Archives and Documentation web­site.