David SUET, artist in residence
Committed to making art and culture accessible to as many people as possible, the University of Montpellier has been hosting artist residencies every year since 2009. Co-financed by the DRAC Occitanie, these residencies aim to promote points of contact between art and academic disciplines. We meet Lozère-based visual artist David Suet, who is in residence at the University of Montpellier until June 2019.
Amaryllis, 2018. Group exhibition Somewhere, sometime: polystyrene dissolutions.
"Thanks to his past residencies in several educational institutions, David Suet has extremely strong mediation potential. In addition to his undisputed talent, his proposals in terms of mediation with the university community have really created a consensus around his candidacy,"explains Marta Cases Bobadilla, cultural action officer at UM and member of the resident artist selection committee since 2015.
Feed
With the theme of "Feeding," the 2018-2019 residency is at the heart of the challenges facing Montpellier University of Excellence. In this context, David Suet proposes to explore this theme through a series of artistic interventions in the university's public spaces. These may involve the production or reappropriation of images, architectural or sculptural proposals. Among the materials considered is sugar, whose artistic interest lies in the many states it can take on (satin, molten, crystallized) and, more broadly, in its links to consumption. "Sugar as a material has interesting potential in the context of university research: it can be found in chemistry and physics laboratories, in the collections of the Institute of Botany, and in works on anthropology and the sociology of consumption,"he explained in mid-July, while supervising, in parallel with his immersion at UM, a scenography of contemporary works in the Cévennes National Park.
Exploration, creation
Immersed in UM since May, David Suet is currently completing his "exploration" phase of the university and its 18 partner members of the I-SITE consortium (guided tours, discussions with scientific and administrative staff and students). "Due to its history, the University of Montpellier has a very special symbolic dimension and represents a tremendous source of inspiration and study, as well as a unique exhibition context that I already feel is very appropriate,"he explained the day after his selection for the 2018-2019 artist residency.
Currently in the process of creating his work, visual artist David Suet defines his artistic practice, beyond the visual arts and the transformation of materials, as a catalyst for encounters with a cross-disciplinary dynamic, both upstream of production, as during his recent visits to the various departments of the university, and downstream, since these encounters are the fundamental material of his work."In this sense, I hope to remain an artist who does not specialize in the use of any particular medium,"he said this summer. All of David Suet's works on the theme of "Feeding" will be on display starting in the spring. The free exhibition of his works, open to all, will then continue until at least the end of June 2019.
The verb "to feed" has several definitions and touches on many areas.
Within the framework of I-SITE, the University of Montpellier and its 18 partners in the MUSE consortium are specifically seeking to find ways to meet the food needs of the nine billion people who will populate the earth by the end of the century. During his nine-month residency at the University of Montpellier, David Suet will focus his artistic research on the disciplines that evoke this term in our institution. His proposal will play on our mental representations, while offering an offbeat perspective on the disciplines associated with the term "nourish."