Théo Casciani is an author. Rétine, his first novel, was published by P.O.L in 2019. His texts have been published in several magazines such as AOC and Klima and presented in institutions such as the Kyoto Art Center or the Centre Pompidou. Some of his works have been translated into several languages and recently gave rise to the  seminar “Speculor” organised by ENSAV de La Cambre and the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is currently writing a romance novel to be published in 2023.

Chris Cyrille-Isaac is a poet, art critic and freelance exhibition designer with an interest in Caribbean philosophies and aesthetics. He is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and has been awarded the Dauphine Prize for Contemporary Art (2017), the Prix Jeune Commissariat at the 69th edition of Jeune Création, and the AICA Prize in 2020. He curated the exhibition “– Mais le monde est une mangrovité (But the world is a mangrove)” in 2021 at the Jeune Création gallery, and is co-directing the publication of the catalogue (Rotolux, 2022).

As a visual artist and musician, sound is at the heart of the work of Jérôme Girard, a graduate of the École national supérieure des Arts décoratifs. He invests and appropriates traditional skills to make musical instruments that immerse spectators in real environments where wandering allows the soundtrack of the space to vary. He was recently a resident at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

In the first part of the evening, Jean de Loisy, co-curator of the exhibition, will give the floor to Raymond Martinez, photographer, great admirer and commentator of Van Gogh’s work. He will be followed by Arnauld Pierre, author, critic, art historian and professor of the History of Contemporary Art at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and author of the book Maternités cosmiques, La recherche des origines, de Kupka à Kubrick aux Éditions Hazan (2010).

This double encounter will be followed by a musical reading of letters by Vincent van Gogh on the theme of Night, imagined and orchestrated by Marie Vauzelle.t

Lettre de Van Gogh à Eugène Boch. Arles, mardi 2 octobre 1888.
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
(Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Louise Chennevière
Photo : Teddy Attia

Sylvain Prudhomme
Photo : ©AFP – Joel Saget

Louise Chennevière
Born 1993 in Paris (France), Louise Chennevière is an author and musician. Her first two novels, Comme la chienne (2019) and Mausolée (2021), were published by P.O.L. Her latest book, Pour Britney (2024), is an intimate, first-person narrative that considers the objectification of the female body through the lives of pop star Britney Spears and author Nelly Arcan. Her letter to Van Gogh addresses the violence inherent in imposed constraints and the dynamics of marginalisation and calls attention to the dissonance between past reception and presentday posterity and the sacrificial nature of artistic creation. She is living in Arles since 2025.

Sylvain Prudhomme
Born 1979 in La Seyne-sur-Mer (France), Sylvain Prudhomme is a novelist and journalist whose literary work is open to the world. His earliest writing was largely inspired by contemporary Africa, where he has spent extended periods living and working (in Senegal, Niger, Burundi and Mauritius.) His publications with Gallimard include Là, avait dit Bahi (2012), Les Grands (2014 – English translation The Greats, Bookthug, 2017), Légende (2016) and Par les routes (2019) – which was awarded the Prix Femina and the Prix Landerneau des lecteurs – as well as the short story collection Les Orages (2021). His latest two books, L’Enfant dans le taxi and Coyote, appeared in 2023 and 2024, respectively, published by Éditions de Minuit. He has lived in Arles since 2012, and works close to the media library, school and Fondation that bear Van Gogh’s name.
Delving into Van Gogh’s letters, he conjures the joys and torment the painter experienced upon his arrival in Provence in 1888.

A performance at the crossroads of theatre, sound creation, and experimental music, by artists Brune Campos and Léo Ceelée.

Brune Campos trained as a clown at the Balthazar circus school (Montpellier) and at Le Lido (Toulouse), before shifting toward contemporary dance through the Extension program at the CND in Toulouse. She has worked and collaborated with choreographers and theatre directors Pascal Rambert, Ulrich Funke, Jean-Marc Heim, Karin Vincke, and Ikue Nakagawa.
Driven by a desire to open her stage practice to other spaces and questions, she pursued a Master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, in the Public Space Art department. Since 2008, she has been developing her own multifaceted projects. Her work unfolds in highly varied contexts, ranging from the Forest prison with Murmuziek, to dance projects in childcare centers with ICI, and radio works in nursing homes with the Graphoui workshops. Her practice constantly navigates the boundary between reality and fiction. > https://brunecampos.com/

Leo CL is a producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist active on the French and Belgian alternative and independent scenes. He has been involved in numerous projects (Hanna & Robbie, Techno Thriller, Ended, Yersinia Pestis, Robbing Millions…). Since 2013, he has produced nearly ten albums across his various groups. In spring 2020, he also composed the music for the animated short film Human Walkers in Motion, directed by Anton Henne and produced by the Play on Pause studio.
Since 2018, Leo CL has been collaborating with Brune Campos on Marrakech, a radio project that also exists in the form of performative and musical stage presentations.,

Leo CL has also been involved in the Murmuziek project since 2018, working as a facilitator and producer for music workshops in a prison setting at Forest Prison (Brussels).  > https://soundcloud.com/leo_cl

Screenshot

A performance at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Magnésie by the author and artist Marin Fouqué takes on the works in the exhibition My cartography: the Erling Kagge collection as well as the space itself, which the artist shapes and reshapes with his voice and body as he moves around. Magnésie, performed without the presence of a live audience, clearly aims to strip off the layers of a world in disintegration. The recording of the performance is inspired by Klara Lidén’s film Column Monkey: a work from 2013 in which a person clings to the column of a derelict building until exhaustion sets in …

Biography
A native of Seine-et-Marne, just east of Paris, Marin Fouqué saw his first novel, entitled 77, published by Actes Sud in August 2019. Praised by the press and honoured with several awards, the book is rooted in the brutality of our times and written in a style marked by the spoken word that attests to the author’s love of French songs, sound poetry and rap. A former warehouse worker and rapper, Marin Fouqué is a veteran of the stage – sometimes a sound poet, always a performer. Since 2015 he has led workshops in which contemporary and classic writing meet, collide, entwine, fuse and resonate. His second novel, G.A.V., which takes place in a police station in his adopted home of Seine-Saint-Denis, will also be published by Actes Sud. A third book, Amer, vagabondage en terres vagues, is in development.

Proposed by Esmé Planchon, storyteller, performer and author, Je fais mon cinéma is conceived as a stroll inspired by the films of Peter Wächtler, a German artist whose works are presented in the exhibition “My cartography: the Erling Kagge collection”.

Performance in French, duration: 15 min

Esmé Planchon is a French author of literature for children and young adults, and an actress. She trained at conservatoires in Paris, before studying at La Maison du Conte from 2015 to 2017. She performs as a storyteller in cinemas and at festivals, and gives storytelling tours of museums. She has published two novels for young people, Faut jouer le jeu (L’École des loisirs, 2014) and On habitera la forêt (Casterman, 2019).

Born in 1979 in Hannover (Germany), Peter Wächtler revives the relationship between pictures and narrative, making his own fiction – and pathologies – the subject matter of his drawings and animation films, which take up the codes cartoons. Wächtler’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Zurich, the Lyon Biennale, MAMCO in Geneva among others.

In collaboration with the festival Les Rendez-vous du son

from 11 October 2015 to 10 January 2016 at the Fondation 

Raphael Hefti, “Quick Fix Remix”, 2015 Railway thermit welding. Performance at “In Favour of a Total Eclipse”, Volcano Extravaganza 2015, Stromboli. Commissioned by Fiorucci Art Trust

For the next few days, sand dunes in front of the Atelier Les Forges in Arles are serving as an improvised foundry – an outdoor thermit-welding studio that is exceptionally open to the public on Thursday 8 October from 6pm to 8pm.
In Quick Fix Remix, Raphael Hefti continuously pours molten metal into channels cut into the sand, where it cools and solidifies into slender pieces of metal reminiscent of Giacometti sculptures or charred twigs.
The artist will use certain of these residual pieces of metal to create one of the installations at his solo show « On Core / Encore » at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, which opens to the public on Sunday 11 October 2015 (admission is free all day on Sunday 11 October).

An aperitif will be served during the performance. 

Performance presented at the invitation of LUMA ARLES