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Irma Name. Laureates of the 2023 ADAGP & Bétonsalon Grant
Research and production grant
ADAGP / Bétonsalon – center for art and research


ENTRE AUTRES CHOSES or BOT (BETWEEN OTHER THINGS)

Artist authors : Hélène Déléan and Clément Caignart

Artist contributors and Performers : Yannis Bahou, Téné Doumbia, Isabel Judez, Jeanne Reverend, kyriaki Vamvaka, Monty Winter

Project team : Alba Therond, Yanxiu Liu, Clemence Warnier, Ryo Baldet, Vincent Enjalbert, Elena Lespes Munoz, Emilie Renard et Susie Richard


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.