Collectif Détente is a curatorial trio founded in 2017 by curators and art historians Gabrielle Boder (1988, Lausanne) and Tadeo Kohan (1987, Geneva/Paris), who were joined by Camille Regli (1990, Zurich) in 2020. In 2018 and 2019, they were in charge of programming the Geneva art space ET-Espace Témoin. In addition to focussing on the role of art in social and intimate spaces, as well as on art’s performative capacity to link the body and space, the collective has also organized exhibitions and performances in Kosovo, France and within the context of festivals (Bâtie, Les Créatives, Antigel, BIG). In 2020, the trio launched the curatorial research project and cycle of exhibitions entitled Stitches, which focused on contemporary textile creation. For its first edition at Le Commun (Geneva, 2021), they brought together 35 artists from the Swiss scene, including James Bantone, Pierrette Bloch, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Cee Füllermann, Maëlle Gross, Sophie Jung, Mai-Thu Perret, Ugo Rondinone and Manon Wertenbroek.
@collectifdetente
Marie-Ève Knoerle has a Master's degree in art history and English literature from the University of Geneva. She co-managed and directed the Piano Nobile space from 1998 to 2015, organizing exhibitions for emerging artists and publishing works. Within this context, she designed a platform dedicated to performance art: the Points d'impact Festival (6 editions). After a curatorial residency in Berlin in 2012, she co-founded the performance programme .perf, which is held at a number of different sites. Both .perf and Piano Nobile were nominated for a Swiss Art Award. She is currently in charge of public art projects at the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC) in addition to her curatorial practice, which revolves primarily around performance art.
Elisa Langlois is an art historian. She studied art history and museology at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, has been Archivist at Geneva’s Bonnier Gallery, and has worked as an independent curator.
From 2014 to 2020, she was responsible for the associative art space Quark in Geneva, which she co-founded in 2013. Through her position, she was able to lend her support to young Swiss and international artists.
Between 2014 and 2021 she regularly participated in BA courses at the Appropriation and Construction programme at HEAD in Geneva.
She is currently in charge of building and managing the M3 collection: a corporate collection that aims to support and promote Swiss and/or Swiss-related creation. This fund combines emerging and established artists.
David Lemaire is an art historian and exhibition curator. First an assistant then a lecturer at the Université de Genève, he went on to become a research fellow at the ENS in Paris and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2011. In 2012, he joined MAMCO as assistant curator, and then became director of the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2018. He is the author of a thesis on Eugène Delacroix (Les hauteurs difficiles, Les presses du réel, 2020), a monograph on Alain Huck (La symétrie du saule, MAMCO, 2015), several exhibition catalogues (Le ciel devant soi, Somogy, 2017 (ed.); Luisanna Quattrini. Accroupissements, Art&fiction, 2018; Kiki Kogelnik. Les cyborgs ne sont pas respectueuses, Art&fiction, 2020 (dir.); Natacha Donzé. Festins, Art&fiction, 2021) and numerous articles on contemporary art.
LIMBO is a collective, collaborative project, and a space for artistic experimentation and critical reflection located in the Eaux-Vives district of Geneva.
LIMBO was born out of a desire shared by four young artists to provide young creators, from both the region and Europe, with a space for sharing and exhibiting their work. Their intention is to question the reality of a city at the crossroads of different cultures, power dynamics, and issues at the heart of our globalized world.
More broadly speaking, LIMBO sees itself as a platform dedicated to interstitial spaces, to the cultural or geographic gaps we inhabit, in the hopes of foregrounding – and thus questioning – the intermediate, hybrid, and mixed spaces of time, territory, cultures, identities and convictions, while simultaneously reaffirming their autonomy.
Aurélien Martin is a visual artist who also organizes exhibitions. He graduated from the Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design de Genève in 2017 and regularly shows his personal work in Switzerland and abroad.
From 2013 to 2016, he was one of the artist-run space Jeudi in Geneva. He also co-founded www.portmanteaurotaryplate.space – a platform for the production and distribution of artist films (which held a retrospective in 2018 at Halle Nord in the video capsule). Since 2018, Aurélien Martin has been running la vraie vie, a nomadic artist-run space that presents the work of contemporary artists from all horizons. For its 2021-22 programme, la vraie vie will be held at Espace Témoin in the GUS ateliers in Geneva.
Maxime Moinet is an art historian and curator. After graduating from the Université de Liège and the University of Cologne, he worked for several galleries and art centres in Montreal, Brussels and Liège before founding Mouvements Sans Titre in 2017, which he has been running ever since. He was the creator and curator of the project Party Content, which lasted from October 2017 to October 2018, and was made up of 12 exhibitions and 5 public actions / performances. The final exhibition for this project, L'Elexposition, submitted a list of candidates for Liège’s municipal elections in order to gain official access to the 35 electoral panels scattered throughout the city. In doing so, the work of 35 Liege, Belgian and foreign artists was presented. In 2019, he created the concept for the exhibition Art au Centre. To date, seven Art au Centre exhibitions have taken place in Liège, thus exhibiting the works of 196 artists in 165 empty shop windows. His research focuses mainly on new exhibition practices and temporary autonomous zones.
Ripopée is an artists' collective composed of Jessica Vaucher and Stéphanie Pfister, who have chosen publishing for their artistic practice. They have collaborated with numerous contemporary artists, producing exhibitions, events, and books. Their publishing house, Ripopée, was founded in 2008 and distributes fanzines, sound projects, and artists' books that are handmade and printed in a workshop and printing press located in Nyon. This space, which houses their entire book collection, has also become a bookshop and meeting place that is open to the public. Ripopée collaborates with other art spaces and bookshops and holds events there, while also participating in numerous regional and international fairs to distribute their publications.
Alexandra Romy is a curator, gallery owner and lawyer. Romy founded the A.ROMY gallery in Geneva in 2020 and moved it to Zurich in 2021. Her gallery represents Swiss artists and regularly participates in international art fairs, such as Liste Art Fair in Basel and art-o-rama in Marseille in 2021; Artissima in Turin and Nada in Miami Beach in 2020, as well as London’s Sunday Art Fair in 2019. Since 2020, Romy has been studying in the Curatorial Studies programme at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZhdK) under the supervision of Dorothee Richter. As a curator, Alexandra Romy was invited to participate in the Massa artist’s residency in Morocco in 2019. In 2021, she has been asked to take part in several projects: the Art au Centre Genève event set up by Halle Nord; the second edition of Baitball in Polignano a Mare (IT) organised by the Italian art spaces Pane Project and Like a Little Disaster; and, finally, to design a group show at the Bass (Miami Beach’s Contemporary Art Museum) project space, which will be inaugurated in November 2021.
Alexandra Nurock is a visual artist. She graduated from HEAD Geneva in 2017 and received the Red Cross – HEAD Art Prize with Collectif MNGH for her MA diploma project. As winner of the 2018 prize from the Bruckner Foundation for Ceramics, several of her works have been acquired by the City of Geneva’s art collection (FMAC). She was able to apply her interest in exhibition practices with La maison de thé (with Alex Baladi and Yves Levasseur) – an art space and tea salon only open on Mondays (1996) – and Mushrooms – two twin street-level shop windows (2011-2012).
Carole Rigaut has a degree in philosophy and an MA in visual art. Since 2006, she has been the director of Halle Nord, an art space presenting the work of artists, mainly from the Geneva art scene. She regularly collaborates with the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève, notably as co-curator of the exhibition Tout ce qui se fait sous le soleil (2015) at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, which showed part of the City of Geneva’s art collection in France for the very first time. She was awarded the City of Geneva's 2012 Mediation Grant for Backdrop Atlas.
Together, Alexandra & Carole have developed the Art au Centre Genève project.