Anne Le Troter, winner 2021

Anne Le Troter (1985) is an artist based in Paris. It was after writing two books, L’ency­clopédie de la matière and Claire, Anne, Laurence, that she began to work cycli­cally on the way the speech of specific groups emerges, by cumu­lating exhi­bi­tions (often acoustic works) that lead to the pro­duc­tion of written plays. Anne Le Troter thus invites groups of people, like ASMR (autonomous sen­sory meridian response) artists, to work with her (L’appé­tence, acoustic instal­la­tion, 2016, Salon de Montrouge and Palais de Tokyo Prize). After working on a form of com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of speech — through a cycle of acoustic instal­la­tions cre­ated around the figure of the tele­phone poll­ster, a cycle spread over two solo exhi­bi­tions and a group exhi­bi­tion (Les mitoyennes at the BF15 in 2015, Liste à puces at the Palais de Tokyo in 2017 and Les silences après une ques­tion at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne in 2017) — today Anne Le Troter’s work is leaning towards the antic­i­pa­tion genre. Invited by the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the Biennale de Rennes, Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre in Saint Nazaire, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Centre Pompidou, the artist has begun a new writing cycle, focusing on the idea of biog­raphy, fic­tion and utopia. In 2020, she was awarded the Villa Kujoyama Prize (Kyoto).

Anne Le Troter, view of the per­for­mance Même pas de mots in the instal­la­tion “Parler de loin ou bien se taire”, 2019. Acoustic work, 20 min, instal­la­tion, var­ious mate­rials, vari­able dimen­sions. Production Le Grand Café – Contemporary Art Centre, Saint-Nazaire and Nasher Sculpture Center (US), Collection Centre Pompidou / Photo credit: Hervé Veronese. Courtesy Anne Le Troter & galerie frank elbaz

The artistic pro­ject

A pro­ject for a medico-social radio sta­tion hosted by the authors of anony­mous works ref­er­enced in the Marc Vaux pho­tog­raphy col­lec­tion.

“As I usu­ally work a great deal with sound archives that I pro­duce or dis­cover, I nat­u­rally went looking for them in the Marc Vaux pho­tog­raphy col­lec­tion. I found them in the inter­stices of the pho­to­graphic images, in other words, in the unrecorded nar­ra­tives that exist between these images by anony­mous authors. Just like Marc Vaux, who estab­lished a mutual aid res­i­dence for artists and intel­lec­tuals, these anony­mous authors, whom I would call “Vol­un­teers” will seek to set up a medico-social radio sta­tion to give voice to the images that con­sti­tute this pho­to­graphic col­lec­tion. In a desire to give them an iden­tity, they speak mainly of their bio­log­ical bodies, the bodies of art workers and the con­di­tion they are in.

Hence, with the assis­tance of the med­ical corps, what this radio sta­tion plans to broad­cast is a rereading of art his­tory from 1920 to 2021, viewed through the prism of medicine. The his­tory of medico-social radio is located in the Montparnasse neigh­bour­hood. The tower had a radio wave relay sta­tion in the 1980s and broad­cast local radio sta­tion pro­grammes, par­tic­u­larly 95.2 FM that included: Médico Social, France Lecture, Sport et Musique and the Paris FM2 radio sta­tion. I want to revive Montparnasse’s radio his­tory by inviting actors from Radio Citron, for example (inspired by La Colifata sta­tion), to play the roles of the authors of the anony­mous works that are part of the Marc Vaux pho­tog­raphy col­lec­tion.

Once this medico-social radio sta­tion has been set up, the sound archives cre­ated will be broad­cast in the form of per­formed radio plays that will be audible through acoustic gar­ments. These acoustic gar­ments will be orches­trated by per­formers who will reveal the words spoken by others, like so many portable radios ready to broad­cast the voices of anony­mous authors in the city. Those who spread the words of others will work as antennas or serve as relays.

Starting from the obser­va­tion that sound, voice and speech are intrin­si­cally mobile, and it is ampli­fi­ca­tion that made sound par­tially seden­tary, I would like to offer a mobile acoustic instal­la­tion, out­doors, that works thanks to people who carry the sound with them, people who carry voices with them and who would be willing to host other people’s words on their own bodies. The words would be seen as organs, seeking to bring a society “to life” in our pre­sent world, reviving it by car­rying these voices around.”

© Antonin Horquin. Courtesy Anne Le Troter & galerie frank elbaz

Artistic com­mittee 2021

Each year the grant is awarded by an artistic com­mittee formed of with pro­fes­­­sionals from the art world. This year, the com­mittee brings together:

Jagna Ciuchta, Artist
Mica Gherghescu, Head of Department for Research Services at Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris
Béatrice Gross, Independant curator and critic
Émilie Renard, Director of Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research
Manuel Segade, Director of Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid
Euridice Zaituna Kala, Artist (2019 grant winner)

ADAGP & Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research Grant

ADAGP & Bétonsalon, sharing common voca­tions - working closely with artists, high­lighting visual her­itages and art his­tory - co-cre­ated a research pro­gram that aims at devel­oping the work of an artist on the cir­cu­la­tion and repro­duc­tion of images, in rela­tion to the research on the Marc Vaux Archive led with Centre Pompidou MNAM-CCI.

This grant, amounting to 20 000 euros, aims to accom­pany an artist in the devel­op­ment of a research, during 3 months, on prob­lem­atics related to rep­re­sen­ta­tion, pro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of images, based on the Marc Vaux Archive and on aca­demic research con­ducted on this archive. This research can be part of the field of art (rereading of art his­tory, exploring unknown and marginal­ized life jour­neys, reflecting on the actual pro­duc­tion of images...) but also in the wider field of the pro­duc­tion of images in a world sat­u­rated with infor­ma­tion (polit­ical, eco¬­nomic, sci­en­tific, jour­nal­istic…).
The 20,000 euros of this grant are intended for cov­ering the artist’s fees (5 000€), their pro­duc­tion budget (10 000€), the costs of sup­porting their pro­ject (5 000€) and (if nec­es­sary) their accom­mo¬­da­tion costs in Paris.

Initiated in 2017, this pro­gram is con­ceived as an artistic research plat­form ded­i­cated to the exper­i­men­ta­tion of non-linear models of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion between researchers, con­tem­po­rary artists, asso­ci­a­tions, cul­tural insti­tu­tions and the gen­eral public.

The former lau­re­ates were franck lei­bovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018) and Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019).

This call is open to artists living or working in France.
The appli­ca­tion must be sent before May 2, 2021.

Call for appli­ca­tions (in French).

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 and so on.
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.

About Marc Vaux Archive at Bibliothèque Kandinsky

A former car­penter who took up pho­tog­raphy after being injured in the First World War, Marc Vaux began in the 1920s to carry his pho­to­graphic chamber around the var­ious artist stu­dios of Montparnasse and Paris. By the early 1970s he had pro­duced over 127 000 pho­tographs. The study of this col­lec­tion, which is now housed at the Centre Pompidou and whose dig­i­ti­za­tion has just been com­pleted, makes it pos­sible to draw up a por­trait of Paris as a cre­ative centre with a hybrid and transna­tional lan­guage, nour­ished by indi­vidual his­to­ries or polit­ical and artistic com­mit­ments too often blended into the lin­earity of the offi­cial nar­ra­tives of a homoge­nous moder­nity.
The fund can be con­sulted on the web­site Archives et doc­u­men­ta­tion of the Centre Pompidou.]