- The exhibition takes the form of an enthusiastic exclamation that returns and extends the work of one year at Villa Medici.
- Presented from June 18 to August 8, 2021, by Laura Cherubini, the exhibition brings together the achievements of 16 artists, creators, and researchers.
- The year-long residency of creation, experimentation, and research culminates at the event held at Villa Medici.
Strongly multidisciplinary, ECCO highlights the articulation between individual creations and collective projects, and weaves unexpected links between the disciplines represented, from painting to sculpture and passing through photography, architecture, sound creation, the history and theory of art, musical composition, plastic arts, and literature.
The uniqueness of this 2021 edition lies in the fruitful encounter between 16 personalities and as many artistic languages, resulting in a collective editorial project that developed during the entire year of residence and which today makes up the key to access the exhibition.
This choral project, conceived by the fellows in the fall of 2020, took the form of a monthly online magazine (ecco-revue.com) that welcomes contributions of the most varied forms: videos, texts, soundtracks, photographs, and drawings. Imagined in a free and experimental form, they develop the magazine in 7 issues, each of which takes as its theme a term that evokes a sound and/or a form as a pretext for reflection.
The end-of-year exhibition is part of this context of collaboration with which the fellows have created a “provisional community” in the words of the curator, Laura Cherubini. The spatial staging of each of the projects – some of which conceived in resonance with the magazine and others independently – will reveal other aspects of contemporary creation.
The ECCO exhibition will be accompanied by an artist’s book that brings together a selection of works by fellows from the French Academy in Rome. The book will be available for sale at Villa Medici.
Founded in 1666 by Colbert, the Académie de France à Rome was created to welcome the winners of the Prix de Rome and the artists protected by the great French nobles who could complete their training in contact with Rome and Italy.
