Odysseas Yiannikouris and Alessandra Monarcha are architects and visual artistes practicing in France, Italy, and Brazil. Sharing the same interest on the hybridity of identities, and ecology, they have been collaborating since 2016. In 2017, as fellow of the French...
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Odysseas Yiannikouris and Alessandra Monarcha are architects and visual artistes practicing in France, Italy, and Brazil. Sharing the same interest on the hybridity of identities, and ecology, they have been collaborating since 2016. In 2017, as fellow of the French Academy in Rome, their research turned into a plural and a-disciplinary production, giving new perspectives to new substances of project: Energy, Climate Nature.
Odysseas Yiannikouris graduated in architecture in 2006. Son of Constantinos and Katerina Yiannikouris, Czech-Cypriot couple of artists installed in Auvergne, he grew up between paintings, tapestries, and rural landscapes. Born in 1984, his interest in ecology is rooted in a generation marked by disasters. If images of the gutted heart of Chernobyl are beard in the collective memory of this decade, the 1991 war has a personal appeal to him. While TV broadcasted images of oil-fires in Kuwait and coalition strikes, the French air force trained few meters over his home. Those shifts in scales and perception _between European artists and French countryside, between wall of sound and war broadcasts_ gave birth to two founding themes of his practice: hybridity of identities, and the modern bound between Violence and Nature. Influenced by Andrea Branzi, Gilles Clément, by Beb Deum, by the situationist planners and by the Ulysses, each of his work emphasis an expression of local identities within relations to our global mobilities. Eventually, he is enthusiastically expecting this particular time when Man, while developing a culture of interactions, will finally surrender to a Nature becoming itself violent: a post-Anthropocene era. In 2007, he trained in Paris with Frédérique Bonnet and from 2009 to 2017 he worked at l’AUC with Djamel Klouche. In parallel he has been developing personal works since 2012 and settled finally in 2017 in Paris.
Alessandra Monarcha Fernandes was born in 1988, from parents architects, in Rio de Janeiro. In 1991 her family moves to Venice where her mother carries on her PhD on Watersheds as a referential spatial unit for territorial and urban planning. Alessandra grew up between Venice’s Calli and Fondamente, and the 12 million of inhabitants Metropolis. Two worlds: La Città d’Acqua, Crocevia of arts and culture ; the tropical Metropolis, the positivist-founded city unfolding under the canopy of the Mata Atlantica. Canali and Ocean, Campi and Praia, Scuola Grande San Marco and Parque do Flamengo, acqua alta and tropical storms. Building upon those contrasts she will finally praise her interests in water as a mean for planning, in non-mercantile public spaces, in architectural sincerity and the poor, in Climate looming Cities. She studied architecture at IUAV from 2008 to 2011, worked in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, and graduated at the ENSA Versailles in 2014. From 2014 to 2017 she worked at l’AUC with Djamel Klouche. Joining the office for 152 Mediterranea, project for the 2014 Venice Biennale, she got then involved into the design and the coordination of major urban projects, in France, China, and Belgium.
Our concern for ecology is rooted in an emerging culture of understanding and integration. From a criticism of the univocal and destructive way we manage our environment, we’ve praised two themes in our research : the hybridity of identities and the link between nature, politics and violence. Those have motivated our practice since 2009. Yet, in 2017, as fellows of the French Academy in Rome, we were given the opportunity to free our work up into a plural and a-disciplinary production. Thus using writings, drawings, photography, and video, digital and physical models, installations, in-situ artworks… all as correlated elements of meaning and expression.Visits of a photovoltaic field, talk with neighbors, cartographic survey, speculation over a culture of energies... expression of an ethic of ecologies, knowledge of the issues of soil, of vegetal, of diversity, in cites, drifts and speculations above the bonified countryside… this set of material is constitutive of an extensive research which aims at multiplicity. Yet sometimes, language and bounds to a broader scope are stepping behind, soften for the benefit of an immersive individual experience. Chapters of a continuous work, the 2017 and 2018 installations we’ve produced, seek evidence : in October 2017, we extracted 4 tons of soil from the gardens of the Villa Medici to unearth 25 m2 of the root system of a bicentennial pine; up to each and everyone to be amazed or worried : form is eloquent enough. In May 2018, we set 220 suns north east of the Villa Medici, up to each and everyone to see our natural bound to this substance of energy.
Exhibitions(selection):- Viva Villa!, curated by Cécile Debray & Federico Nicolao, Marseille, 2018- Take Me (I’m yours), curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Christian Boltanski, Chiara Parisi, Rome, 2018- Notte Bianca - Villa Medici, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto, Rome, 2017