David SUET, resident artist

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-funded by the DRAC Occitanie, these residencies aim to foster points of contact between art and university disciplines. Meet Lozère-based visual artist David Suet, in residence at the heart of the UM until June 2019.

Amaryllis, 2018. Group exhibition En quelque endroit, quelques temps: polystyrene dissolutions.

" David Suet has an extremely strong mediation potential, thanks to his past residencies in a number of schools. In addition to his undisputed talent, his proposals in terms of mediation with the university community really created consensus around his candidacy", explains Marta Cases Bobadilla, in charge of cultural action at the UM and a member of the resident artist selection committee since 2015.

Feeding

With "Nourrir" as its theme, the 2018-2019 residency is right at the heart of the challenges facing Montpellier Université d'Excellence. In this context, David Suet proposes to feed this theme with a series of plastic interventions in the university's public space. These could involve the production or misappropriation of images, or architectural or sculptural proposals. Among the materials envisaged is sugar, for example, whose plastic interest lies in the many states it can cover (satiny, poured, crystallized sugar) and, more broadly, in the links it has with consumption. " Sugar as a material has an interesting potential in university research: it can be found in chemistry and physics laboratories, in the collections of the Institute of Botany, and in works on the anthropology and sociology of consumption", he explained in mid-July, when, in parallel with his immersion at the UM, he was supervising a scenography of contemporary works on the Cévennes National Park.

Exploration, creation

Immersed at the UM since May, David Suet is currently completing his phase of "exploration" of the university establishment and its 18 partner members of the I-SITE consortium (guided tours, exchanges with scientific and administrative staff and students). " Because of its history, the University of Montpellier has a very special symbolic dimension and represents a formidable source of inspiration and study, as well as an unprecedented 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 own work, visual artist David Suet defines his artistic endeavors, beyond the plastic work and the transformation of materials, as an engine of encounters with a cross-disciplinary dynamic, both upstream of a production, as in his recent visits to various parts 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 this or that medium", he confided this summer. All David Suet's works on the theme of "Nourrir" will be on view from spring onwards. The exhibition of his work, free and open to all, will then run at least until the end of June 2019.

The verb "to feed" has many definitions and touches on many fields.
As part of the I-SITE project, the University of Montpellier and its 18 partners in the MUSE consortium are looking at how to meet the food needs of the nine billion people who will inhabit the earth by the end of the century. During his nine-month residency at the heart of the UM, 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 look at the disciplines evoking the term "Nourrir".