/’kœr’/ core

The phonetic association between the words “cœur” (heart) and core functions like a mirror. The object projects an image of itself, slightly distorted that nevertheless belongs to the same reality. /‘kœr’/ If we translate the word core, we arrive at the word “cœur” (heart).

Generation·s of softness·s

sediment·s of security·s

Visceral poetics of the Core Memory*.

Soft shapes perfect for scraping cold surfaces

Warmth invites itself between damp stones

What are we to do with these angular summons embracing the void?

Complete the cocoons of beloved flesh?

I find comfort in the /’kœr’/ of dunes

In the deviations of divinatory cells

I rest.

Core memory : literally meaning: “central memory”. It’s a porous core. Tous leurs souvenirs : They feel, they remember. “we need core memories” to remember. Ça touche le cœur. I know this smell. Nous nous souvenons tous·tes. Les mêmes sensations dans nos corps, eyes closed. Inside us there is something that remembers. Quelque chose de connecté au monde qu’on ressent. The body with the wind, the smell of the sun and the traces disappearing over time.

Valentine Antoine is a fourth-year student at the ESACM. She sees her work as an exploration of matter, body and memory. Her sculptural work and writing take us on a sensitive, sensory journey from reality to a personal, dreamlike introspection. Using materials such as metal, fabric, plaster, raw clay, ceramics, she summons the interior and exterior of a physical and spiritual space. Valentine Antoine explores these spaces and materials in various installations using elements reminiscent of the bedroom, the bathroom, the threshold of a house and what lies beyond.

Léon Barisad is a student at the ESACM and lives in Clermont-Ferrand. She explores the city looking for non-places, gaps, peculiar and forgotten spaces. For Léon, these places are refuges to find oneself, to invent new ways of doing things and imagine other possibilities. Through her installations, Léon tries to recreate these spaces with materials, found objects and tools she makes. She also uses stories from friends, making her work resonate with her own life experiences and encounters. She seeks accessible and quick ways to share elements of her narratives and references, namely through micropublishing.

Hillary Benkemoun Korkut (born in 1999 in Lyon) is a fourth year student at the ESACM. She attempts to redefine domestic spaces, intimacy and the personal anecdote by appropriating feminine, girly, pop and DIY aesthetics. Working with textile, sculpture, installation and animation, she creates objects that she exaggerates through their form, material and scale.

Clem Caçat is a lesbian and non-binary artist who has been studying at the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges for the last four years. Analogue photography is the main pillar of their work, which also includes ceramics, edition, sonnets and video. They also perform as a DJ. Their work focuses on the body and its relationship to its surroundings, intimacy and lesbianism. Intimacy, to them, is political. Especially when that intimacy is queer.

Camille Cheyre was born in Paris in 2000. She is currently a third-year student at the ESACM. Her work uses the notion of home as a starting point; she reinterprets her memories with familiar shapes, in a blend of sarcasm and gentleness.

Gahé Daubercies is a fifth-year student at the ESACM. Through text, sound, movement and the manipulation of matter and form, they look for ways to resonate: with oneself, with others, with space. Drawing on sensitive experiences and encounters, Gahé Daubercies enjoys learning and sharing, trying to do things differently or without knowing. They invited Léon Bornais and Amélie Rollin to join them at In extenso with the intention of sharing their thoughts on various forms of living we invent on a daily basis; the spaces that welcome us and the links we forge with one another.

Lisa-Line De Jesus is in her fifth year at the ESACM. After a gap year during which she experimented with navigation and a chosen nomadic lifestyle, movement became a central notion in her work. She analyses and questions her own privileges through installations and sculptures. Using inherited and salvaged materials, she weaves intimate narratives that combine with a desire to pass on knowledge. Lisa-line invited Sofiia Yevlaninkova to offer a sensitive encounter, a form of exploration of their shared landscapes.

Charles Fredon (born in 2001 in Limoges) is currently a fourth-year student at the ESACM. He explores science fiction visually, using light, texture and materials to construct narratives. The raw materials express the aesthetic of sci-fi without overt intervention. His minimalist installations, composed of manufactured objects, evoke images of utopia or dystopia and intertwine with reality.

Camille Guitard is currently in her fourth year at the École européenne supérieure de l’image in Poitiers. Her work draws on the world of parties. These spaces allow for the manifestation of creatures and entities through the costumes she makes and uses to perform different personalities linked to their appearance. She sees that world as a space-time where excess and freedom prevail, enabling a form of healing.

Taïs Gutin is a fourth-year student at the ESACM. She defines her works as a narrative that unfolds through installation and writing. She is interested in the various understandings of a thing and how to highlight this multiplicity. She’s sensitive to Valentine Antoine’s work and the questions she addresses. Taïs Gutin joins her in this collective exhibition in order to deploy the subtle connections that lay in between these very reading layers to make them visible.

Lou Maneval was born in Saint-Etienne in 2002, and has studied at the ESACM since 2020. She explores the tension between a childhood in the countryside spent on her computer, and a life in art institutions, while dealing with emotional disappointments and political issues.

Gaston Olive is currently in his fourth year at the École européenne supérieure de l’image in Poitiers. He is a multi-disciplinary artist who reinterprets pre-existing worlds in his work, as part of a post-production approach. He takes an interest in confidential or forgotten spaces and cultures, learning to master their codes and aesthetics in order to bring them to light and prolong them through his productions.

Amélie Papon (born in 2000 in Clermont-Ferrand) is a fourth year-student at the ESACM. She chose to work with Charles Fredon and Hillary Benkemoun due to their common areas of interest. This collaboration stems from a desire to create an artwork that combines universes drastically different in aesthetics but that nevertheless share underlying themes.  A parallel was created with Amélie Papon’s work, which questions what connects and separates the organic, textile and digital in the transmission of information through code – between physical, metaphysical and intergenerational spaces.

Amélie Rollin is in her last year at the ESACM. As a child, she used to spend time in a cabin built by her grandfather, floating in the middle of a pond. Today, she tells the story of the cabin’s disappearance and uses this story as a starting point to create an imaginary space linked to childhood. Her installations as well as her ceramic and textile objects reflect a porous cohabitation between the human habitat and animal and vegetal spaces. Her contaminated and hybrid pieces are an attempt to give a sentient place to the artefacts of daily life, while creating a space of refuge that speaks of childhood as a shelter outside the authority of adults.

Eva Salgueiro Gonçalves was born in the Oise department of France in October 2002. She’s a third-year student at the ESACM and lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand. Her work revolves around domestic environments, epistolary imagination and emotional communication. She specialises in printing and publishing techniques.

Leo Simonitto — Delettre is a non-binary artist, performer and photographer, and a fifth-year student at the ESACM. Between documentation and autofiction, their work deals with the body and metamorphosis, the intimate, green rooms, the before/after of a performance, and the notion of the periphery.

Messaoud Soufari is a fifth-year student at the ESACM. His work revisits myths and archetypes taken from the internet, embodying them and giving them space in order to put them in crisis. He explores the intersections between fiction and reality, play and sincerity, analysing their impact on our bodies and relationships.

Ismaël Tapin is a fourth-year student at the ESACM. He combines his personal life with his work in order to render it more tangible. He starts from specific situations in order to tackle universal concepts. He goes on artistic expeditions that he later recounts through the form which embodies his experience the best.

Sofiia Yevlaninkova discovered photography while studying psychology in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She explored the city with this new eye and travelled to Iceland to give free workshops. Nurtured by cinema and her sensitivity to her surrounding landscapes, she enrolled in a preparatory class in Cherbourg and then at the ESACM in 2022. She uses drawing, writing and video to create poetic and sensitive forms that oscillate between the imaginary and the mundane.

This project was developed as part of the “Reality of an exhibition” partnership with the École supérieure d’art Clermont Métropole.