Yamile VILLAMIL ROJAS, laureate of the 2019 call for applications
The residence started in 2019, due to the lockdown and sanitary situation it continued until the winter of 2020. The restitution of her work is to be discovered online.
This restitution takes the form of a website showing different sections, reinvesting the form of the fanzine through digital. This virtual fanzine “Ammonite” is inspired by the almanac and presents the results of the reflections made with the neo-farmers met in Digne who have invested the territory in a quest for “better living” and who have implemented more coherent economic practices where food sovereignty is at the heart of their reflections.
Yamile Villamil Rojas, Colombian artist and researcher living in France since 2013, is interested in collaborative practices in art and works more specifically around popular and secular rituals. Encounter is a fundamental dimension of her projects which question notions of identity, otherness, cultures and territories. Her approach is part of a history of participatory art where the aim is to create in the social space (and to be interested in its realities) rather than in the studio, collectively rather than in isolation. The work is not the fruit of the work of the artist alone, but that of a collaboration in the presence of the artist and volunteers.
In residency at CAIRN, she chose to start with the figure of the Minkas* in order to establish a “circle of speech and thought” with the inhabitants and thus engage in a reflection on the body as an “extension or avatar of the land we inhabit” (Yamile Villamil Rojas). The objective, according to the artist, is to question the way in which individual and collective memory constructs a “refuge” through the body, the works, the objects, the archives but also through a certain ecology of the relationship. To make emerge and (re)construct the memory of a territory by collaborating with its daily actors to contribute to the reinvention of the possible forms and places of the collective.
- A gathering practice set up by indigenous people on the American continent in which a community engages in a dialogue that must support individual and collective memory, weaving the wefts of a society or culture. (about the artist in his note of intent)
Yamile Villamil Rojas was born in 1985 in Bogotá. She lives and works in Paris since 2014. Artist and researcher, she obtained a Master 1 in Aesthetics, Practice and History of Plastic Arts and a Master 2 in Media, Design and Contemporary Art at the University of Paris 8. Currently, Yamile Villamil Rojas is pursuing a PhD in Arts and Languages at EHESS in Paris and has completed several co-creation projects in France and Colombia. His projects have been presented in solo and group exhibitions such as Visions Magiques (José Celestino Mutis Botanical Garden – Bogotà), Ici & ailleurs (Espace Khiasma, Paris), Papier Machine (Levi Strauss Library, Paris). Yamile Villamil Rojas conducts “creative mediations” (Nous ne sommes pas le nombre que nous croyez être, Béton salon center d’art et de recherche, Paris) and regularly intervenes in publications and as a speaker (museums and cultural centers in France and Colombia).
