Clémence de Montgolfier
Clémence de Montgolfier was born in 1987, she lives and works in Paris.
Since 2010, she has collaborated under the name The Big Conversation Space (TBCS) with American artist Niki Korth (born in 1987, lives and works in San Francisco). Together and separately, they explore the circulation of discourse through contemporary technologies of production and reproduction, as well as their uncertain futures. They create events, conversations, performances, publications, games, documents, video programs, and media platforms that aim to establish and question relationships between individuals (including artists and audiences), within an interactional conception of the artwork. Positioned at the intersection of mediation, art, and media, their work seeks to generate real or figurative conversations through objects and communication tools that they reinterpret or invent. By doing so, they question the space between self and other, proposing modes of coexistence and understanding within the historical and technical context of the media we have inherited.
Clémence de Montgolfier graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts d’Angers in 2011 and obtained a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences from the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris III in 2017. She is the co-founder, alongside Hugo Brégeau, of the exhibition space Indice 50 in Paris. Together with Niki Korth, she has participated in numerous exhibitions in France and abroad, including at CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge; Villa du Parc, Annemasse; 8, Rue Saint-Bon, Paris; Le Nouveau Festival at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Human Resources, Los Angeles. Since 2015, they have collaborated with le149.net (Anna Hess and Sacha Béraud) on the online video programming project BCC Channel, in partnership with Alexander Rhobs.
Residency Project:
The Big Conversation Space translates its project into a spatial format with Conversations on Empathy, a title referencing the subject of the upcoming episode of their experimental web series BCC Channel. Designed as an experimental and research-based space, it includes elements meant to facilitate exchange and dialogue, such as a bridge table and personalized fortune cookies available for free. This space becomes a stage for interactions that are both sincere and performative. Conversations on Empathy serves as a prelude, a spatial extension, and a research hub for the development of the web series’ eponymous episode. (Mathilda Portoghese, 2018).
