Irma Name, Datation1, 2023, photographic document. Courtesy and photo : Irma Name © ADAGP, Paris, 2023 / Irma Name.
Irma Name, Datation1, 2023, photographic document. Courtesy and photo : Irma Name © ADAGP, Paris, 2023 / Irma Name.
Irma Name, Cloud and Coal, 2021, performance. Courtesy Irma Name © ADAGP, Paris, 2021 / Irma Name. Photo : La synagogue de Delme, 2021.
Irma Name, Datation1, 2023, photographic document. Courtesy and photo : Irma Name © ADAGP, Paris, 2023 / Irma Name.
Irma Name, Datation1, 2023, photographic document. Courtesy and photo : Irma Name © ADAGP, Paris, 2023 / Irma Name.
Irma Name, Cloud and Coal, 2021, performance. Courtesy Irma Name © ADAGP, Paris, 2021 / Irma Name. Photo : La synagogue de Delme, 2021.
BOT (Between Other Things) – Research and production grant ADAGP / Bétonsalon 2023
Irma Name
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.
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.
BOT (BETWEEN OTHER THINGS)
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.
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.
Irma Name (Hélène Déléan and Clément Caignart)
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)
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.
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.
