Mélio Villemot

Mélio Villemot is a visual artist and researcher in the sociology of the arts and creative work. He is a member of La Buse - an independent, activist research laboratory that observes the worlds of the arts as workplaces - and the Travailleureuses de l’art 13 collective - a group of unionized and non-unionized arts workers based in Aix-Marseille.

Until 2020, he developed a body of video, installation and performance work exploring the relationship between self-awareness, awareness of others and the body envelope. He then suspended his plastic research to devote himself entirely to a survey of creators who have resigned from the institutional networks of contemporary art, as part of a Master’s degree in arts, literatures and languages at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). The results of this investigation will be published at the end of 2024 by L’Harmattan in a book named Les artistes peuvent-iels faire autre chose que de l’art ? [Can artists do anything other than make art?].

Today, he works on and for the right to self-determination of the body, observing and describing how sexual dissidence has been organized in Marseille over the past ten years. The context in which this latest research began was the rise of extreme right-wing ideologies. This climate convinced him of the need to show, on a local scale, the influence of politics on bodies, and the way in which bodies have been able, and are able, to act on politics. So it’s as much about social relationships as it is about the material conditions they generate and which generate them that he wants to stage.