Curators’ talk with Missla Libsekal and Clelia Coussonnet

Alternating annually for four years between Paris and Vancouver, the aim of the France/Canada Curatorial Residency program is to provide opportunities to develop curatorial projects and foster cultural exchange in response to contemporary art contexts in France and Western Canada. 

This residency program is a collaboration between The Polygon Gallery, Griffin Art Projects, and Cité internationale des arts, with the support of The Embassy of France in Canada and the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. The program was established in October 2021. Writer, curator, and cultural producer Missla Libsekal (Vancouver) was awarded the inaugural residency, which took place at the Cité internationale des arts in the Marais district of central Paris. In September 2022, curator, researcher, and writer Clelia Coussonnet (Marseille) started a three-month curatorial residency at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver.

Now, the inaugural recipients of the Paris - Vancouver curatorial research residencies come together in person to introduce their research and works in progress as situated practices of care and kinship. They will share how research, knowledge production, storytelling and place-making inform their projects. 

This program is a collaboration between The Polygon Gallery, Griffin Art Projects, and Cité internationale des arts, with the support of The Embassy of France in Canada and the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris.

Missla Libsekal (b. Addis Abeba, Ethiopia) is an independent curator and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. Recent projects include Creating Art Archives (2021) and Beyond What We See. Once upon a time, once upon a future (2021), Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse. She is the founder of Another Africa (2010 - 2016), a digital platform for writing on and about African and Afro-Diasporic experiences and imaginaries. Her writings on existing and emerging lexicons in contemporary Pan African visual practice have been published in The Africa Report, The Guardian, Art Africa, SAVVY art journal, Another Africa and more. She is the guest curator of the Fall 2023 International Artist-In-Residency at Artspace San Antonio.

Clelia Coussonnet is an independent curator, researcher, editor and writer. She is interested in how visual cultures address political, social and spiritual issues in different, or complementary, ways to other disciplines. Her research revolves around botanical politics and power structures, investigating political imprints on plants, circulation and resilience. As a ramification, she dives into riverine and marine environments considering liquidity, toxicity and contamination. In Vancouver, she will pursue her research, exploring how the colonial history of Canada has made use of plants to assert power over territories, considering the meanders of the city's waterways and aqueous reserves, and listening to the legacies and murmurs that lie in the earth and sediments.