David SUET, artist-in-residence
Committed to making art and culture accessible to as many people as possible, the University of Montpellier has hosted artist residencies every year since 2009. Co-funded by the DRAC Occitanie, these residencies aim to foster connections between art and academic disciplines. We spoke with Lozère-based visual artist David Suet, who is in residence atUM June 2019.
Amaryllis, 2018. Group exhibition *Somewhere, for a while: polystyrene dissolutions*.
“Thanks to his past residencies at several educational institutions, David Suet has tremendous potential as an arts educator. In addition to his undisputed talent, his proposals for engaging with the university community truly fostered a consensus around his candidacy,”explains Marta Cases Bobadilla, cultural programs coordinator atUM a member of the resident artist selection committee since 2015.
Feed
With the theme “Nourishing,” the 2018–2019 residency is at the very heart of the challenges facing Montpellier University of Excellence. In this context, David Suet proposes to explore this theme through a series of visual art interventions in the university’s public spaces. These may involve the creation or reinterpretation of images, as well as architectural or sculptural proposals. Among the materials under consideration is sugar, for example, whose artistic appeal lies in the many forms it can take (satin-finished, cast, crystallized) and, more broadly, in its connections to consumption.“Sugar as a material has interesting potential in the context of university research: it can be found everywhere from chemistry to physics laboratories, from the collections of the Institute of Botany to works on the anthropology and sociology of consumption,”he explained in mid-July, while he was supervising—in parallel with his immersion atUM—a curatorial installation of contemporary works in the Cévennes National Park.
Exploration, Creation
David Suet, who has been on an immersion program atUM May, is currently wrapping up his “exploratory” phase at the university and its 18 partner institutions in the I-SITE consortium (guided tours, discussions with academic and administrative staff, and students).“Given its history, the University of Montpellier has a very special symbolic significance and represents a tremendous source of inspiration and study, as well as a unique exhibition setting that I already sense will be very appropriate,”he explained the day after his selection for the 2018–2019 artist-in-residence program.
Currently in the process of creating his work, visual artist David Suet defines his artistic practice—beyond visual art and the transformation of materials—as a catalyst for cross-disciplinary encounters, both in the early stages of production—such as during his recent visits to various university departments—and in the later stages, since these encounters serve as the fundamental material for his work.“In that sense, I hope to remain an artist who isn’t specialized in the use of any particular medium,”he said this summer. David Suet’s entire body of work centered on the theme of “Nourishment” will be on view starting this spring. The free exhibition, open to the public, will run at least through the end of June 2019.
The verb “to feed” has several definitions and touches on many fields.
Within the framework of I-SITE, the University of Montpellier and its 18 partner members of the MUSE consortium are specifically focused on finding ways 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 ofUM, David Suet will structure his artistic research around the disciplines at our institution that evoke this term for him. His project will play with our mental representations while offering an offbeat perspective on the disciplines associated with the term “nourish.”