Since its first edition in 2018, with Quebec as guest of honor, the Biennial of Digital Imaginaries has cultivated a valuable partnership with the Délégation Générale du Québec à Paris and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. A partnership supported once again this year by the welcome of the Quebec showcase for this fourth edition of the Biennale.
This privileged relationship has strengthened exchanges with Quebec’s dynamic, avant-garde artistic scene, and in 2023 gave rise to a cross-residency in partnership with Les Productions Recto-Verso, producer of the Mois Multi international multidisciplinary and electronic arts festival in Quebec City.
Each year, this program offers a Quebec-based digital arts curator or artist research time in Marseille, while a French artist explores new perspectives in Quebec City.
For this second edition, the artists selected are Quebec’s Paolo Almario and France’s Maureen Béguin.
Paolo Almario
In residence at CHRONIQUES, Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille, France) from January to March 2025
Colombian-born artist based in Chicoutimi (QC, Canada) since 2011. A graduate of Los Andes University in Bogota and holder of a Master of Arts from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Paolo Almario’s work explores the tensions between identity, migration and geopolitics. His creations have been exhibited in several countries, including Canada, Belgium, Morocco, France and Thailand, and were recognized with the Prix du Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec: Créateur de l’année au Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean in 2018. In 2015, Paolo Almario was granted refugee status in Canada, and in 2022 he became a Canadian citizen.
At the same time, Paolo Almario teaches digital arts at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. He is co-founder of Ubchihica, the only digital arts research and creation center in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, and chairs the Conseil des arts de la Ville de Saguenay.
Paolo Almario uses digital technologies to create interactive installations that question themes of identity, science and/or socio-politics. Combining art and robotics, he designs devices that confront viewers with the tensions between control and freedom, echoing his own experiences of migration and exile.
Almario frequently tackles critical and committed themes that resonate with the socio-political context of his homeland. Through his art, he positions himself as a social actor, deeply influenced by the cultural, social and political framework that surrounds him. Through his practice, he aims to poetically and metaphorically reveal the potentially destructive complexity of political structures, prompting reflection on that of the territory where his work is presented.
Residency project: Les Lignes Fracturées
“Les Lignes Fracturées” is a research project aimed at creating one or more interactive installations. These will be composed of automated virtual or real barriers evoking geopolitical limits and the systems that govern them. Inspired by my personal experience as a refugee, these works will explore the perceptible and imperceptible obstacles that shape the trajectories of displaced people, constraining their freedom of movement and modulating their relationship to space.
These reactive barriers will be complex control systems combining surveillance, video-projection and electromechanical elements to modulate the passage and trajectories of spectators. They will question the dynamics of power, exclusion and control that often define the migratory experience. Designed for public spaces or galleries, these installations invite reflection on the materiality of borders and their emotional, social and political impact.
Conceptual research on materials and device behavior will be carried out during the residency, enabling us to fully experiment with the project’s potential.”
Paolo Almario
Maureen Béguin
In residence at Productions Recto-Verso (Québec) from January to February 2025
Maureen Béguin – Morin (she/they) performs fictions in which both the body and technology fall prey to the same problem: overheating linked to global warming.
A Franco-Irish visual artist and performer, she browses and collects spatial and virtual data to create transdisciplinary site-specific performances.
Browsing – That’s what she calls her protean practice, which blends bodywork, video, scenography, 3D and trance on the Internet. She wanders between the real and digital worlds, crossing tabs and virtual windows that she connects to her muscles and speech in contemporary art galleries, theaters and non-institutional venues to convey her stories.
Born into the advent of digital technology as a solution to every obstacle, she was transformed in 2015 into the character of Maureen Morin, an eccentric mediator and designer who creates sensory tours to denounce technological colonial capitalism and its data centers thirsty for our data. The artist’s words carry a certain gravity, yet they don’t indulge in moralizing. In his view, militant intentions are best conveyed through emotion and humor.
In 2021, she will create a vernacular project, Motherboards, from which a number of theatrical and experimental performances will emerge. It’s a motherboard with the date January 1, 2050 at its heart – a key marker in the IPCC reports: not exceeding 2° degrees Celsius for a sustainable world.
For 2025, Maureen will be updating Motherboards at venues such as Centre Wallonie Bruxelles and Doc! (Paris, France), at Buda Kunstencentrum (Kortrijk, Belgium) and at Moi-Multi in Quebec City, Canada, where she is in residence for the months of January and February, with the support of CHRONIQUES.
