I had the privilege to interview with Olivier Collet and Jérôme Lefaure, founders of homesession, an artists' residency. Based in Barcelona, they open the doors of their own house to emerging artists and give them the chance to create and show their work. Fascinating !
Can you please introduce yourself?
We are Olivier Collet and Jérôme Lefaure, two French guys established in Barcelona. We're deeply interested in contemporary visual arts and we want to be involved in the local art scene, supporting the creation and diffusion of works of artists we like.
Can you tell us more about homesession?
homesession is a project founded in 2007, in Barcelona, essentially based at the beginning on an Artist-In-Residence (A.I.R.) programme. The main specificity of the project is that we receive the artists in our own house.Till now, we've received 10 artists from different countries; they are emerging artists, whose works are created with different media, mainly video, installation, sculpture, photography. Each residency is orientated to the development of a specific work or project. A public presentation is organized at the end of the residency.We have also launched, this year, a new programme, called "invitedOneDay". The idea is to collaborate with barcelonese artists and to support site-specific artworks, with a very sharp format: we invite, litterally, an artist for one day to create a work at our place. Like for the residencies, we organize a public presentation of the project: in this case, the work will be shown at the end of the day.
Our criteria to choose an artist are finding people investigating the relationship between public and private space, architecture and design in an urban context, site-specific projects...
Why Barcelona?
Barcelona is the place where we live and our house is a major element for this project. Barcelona is also the city where we've developed the strongest involvement with the artistic scene. We used to live in Paris. And this is actually a project we couldn't have launched in Paris: it's nearly impossible there to get a space like the one we have here and you can't manage a project like that in a 50 square-meter flat. We also think that the interactions within the parisian art scene are much more patchy than the ones in Barcelona.
Would you be interested in developing this concept in more cities in Europe?
No, the idea is not to create a concept, which would become a franchising network afterwards. We actually receive few artists, because we think there must be a special relationship with them to promote their work in a proper way. A further development could consist in launching new programmes or a very different project, but not duplicating an hypothetical established concept that wouldn't leave any room to chance and unexpected developments.
Who is the artist that you are currently showing?
Our current resident is Juan Duque, a colombian artist living in Belgium.
He presented his work on 6 of March 2010.
What's the exhibition about?
The truth is that it's not really an exhibition. We're not a gallery. It's the production of an artwork. At the end of the stay, we organize an opening, but we're more interested in sharing our experience about the creation process than to show a definitive artwork. Juan Duque works with papers, liquids such os oil, water and its relationship with the medium itself etc. His installation "look at" the site where it has been conceived and integrate it in its own rights.
What messages is he trying to convey?
Juan investigates territories and landscape using on-site creation. His work is actually linked to our relationship with the landscape, as a socio-psychic combination of layers on which traces and decompositions act like witnesses.
Do you have more exhibitions coming up?
We will receive the Finnish artist Sabrina Harri in April, and North American artist Adam Davis this summer. We're also going to present an art video screening for the Loop Festival (http://www.loop-barcelona.com/).
To finish with, what would you wish to this blog?
I wish you to keep posting interesting articles about creation and to give an alternative point of view to common media.
Thanks to you Olivier and Jérôme
More information: http://www.homesession.org/
