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Residency in Switzerland, Martigny at Villa Mirage – Collective Autobiography, 2025
The collective autobiography is composed of the artists:
Eduardo Cruces (Chile/Turkey), Nihan Somay (Turkey), Raed Ibrahim (Jordan), Venice Spescha (Switzerland/France), Tracy Lim (United States/South Korea), and Katerina Samara (Greece), accompanied by curator Sibylle Omlin (Switzerland).
The second gathering, in spring 2025, took place at Villa Mirage in Martigny, a collective artistic space that includes a studio, meeting rooms, exhibition halls, and a residency space. The Villa is housed in a building from the industrial era, which serves as an important source of inspiration for artistic work and research, and is located near Martigny’s train station. We connected with Cécile Giovannini and Alain Bardet, two artists from Villa Mirage. We continued our research begun in Athens, shared our work within the group and with the public, and organized a round table presenting the results of the 2024 and 2025 gatherings in the form of an exhibition and a presentation.
Publication – Commentary
During the working days, we published a commentary recalling the week spent in Athens and Martigny. Several intersections of guests, bringing in topics from diverse geographical and social contexts, enriched our work.
Discussion at the Manoir
On the evening of May 9, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., we held a discussion in the Villa Mirage cafeteria, in the presence of Julia Taramarcaz, curator of the Manoir.
Residency Greece, Athens,
Noucmas Art space 2024
The autobiography is speaking about personal memories and contains details of our subject’s life. The connection of memory to the actual time of live is important in choosing and interpreting memories.
Autobiographies are a communication format through which life history material is choreographed. In au- tobiographical writing, memories are selected, smoothed and organized; connections are made be- tween events in a way that is only possible in retrospect. It is a life story told by the subject himself. In con- trast, a biography is told by a third party. Despite the hybrid and fluid character of the genre compared to other genre forms such as memoirs or diaries, self-understanding, self-interpretation and communication with others are fixed parameters in which autobiographical writing takes place. Today, (auto)biographies a biop- ic movies have become a multifaceted phenomenon and a fundamental communication code of our lifeworld.
Overall, biography can be seen as a construct in the sense of an ‘opus operatum’ (Pierre Bourdieu), a product that is de- tached from concrete action and has become an interpretation. However, this raises the question of whether such a clear reference can still be maintained at all in contemporary societies, as the overall biographical view lacks a ‘corresponding social counterpart’ and the multitude of groups to which people belong excludes us from being fixed on a uniform self.
Nevertheless, the script of an autobiography contains historical, social and cultural content and re- fers to the constitutional conditions of sociality through communication. We do not learn from an autobi- ography what a person was or is like, nor even how he/she actually sees him/her/self; instead, we learn how we communicates ourselves and our biography in a specific context of a life and a cultural publicity. Autobiographical research as artists and creators in our group.
As a firsthand account of the author’s own life – a life story conceived and written by the subjects themselves – an autobiography offers readers an unmatched level of intimacy. As self-formed group of artists with exploring our life and work in the public sphere of art, this intimacy is of high interest for us. Beside the work that we show in pub- lic, we interested to share some aspects of our lives and the production process in the public space. We chose to explore this in the form of a common memoir, exploring a specific period of a person’s life after finishing our studies. In October 2024, The Autobiography collective composed of artists:
Eduardo Cruces (Chile/Turkey), Nihan Somay (Turkey), Raed Ibrahim (Jordan), Venice Spescha (Switzerland/France), Tracy Lim (United States/South Korea), and Katerina Samara (Greece), together with curator Sibylle Omlin (Switzerland)—undertook a creative residency in Greece, partially virtual, and presented the results of their research at NOUCMAS art space in Athens, Greece.