VISITING FIRE : tending lands, conversations, and stories; smoke, ashes and flames

Villa Albertine San Francisco and CCA invite you to delve into the topic of fires through a panel discussion featuring artist in residence Garance Maurer, who will be joined by CCA community members working on the topic of fire as a creative tool and destructive force. 

Practicing a situated methodology, fieldwork, and material experiments with fire, Garance has spent her residency exploring the phenomenons of megafires, cultural burns, and the role of fire in cultural practices since September 2024. Going beyond fire’s dual nature as a tool for creation and a force of destruction, the event will focus on a return to controlled burning methods historically used by the Indigenous peoples of California for environmental management and as an intangible cultural bond through an exploration of fire materialities, artistic practices, and collective work to heal our damaged relationship with the land and foster a sense of commonality. 

Discover the material experiments in ceramics, jewelry making, and textile workshops relying on materials harvested across California burn scars and regions at the heart of contemporary controlled burns, alongside snippets of Garance’s research documentation through film, drawing, and field notes. 

Join us for an illuminating panel discussion that bridges art, ecology, and cultural heritage.

Guests and speakers:

Garance Maurer, Visiting Artist

Sunny A. Smith, CCA, Dean of Fine Arts

Curtis Arima, CCA, CCA, Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Ceramics, Jewelry and Metal Arts, Sculpture, Textiles, and Individualized programs in Fine Arts

Sabine de Maussion, The Villa Albertine San Francisco, Director and Cultural

Attachée

Gavin Kroeber, Independent artist

Annie Leverich, The Watershed Center of Hayfork, Communications Manager

Alia Brookshire, Graduate Student of the Program of Architecture at CCA

FEATURED ARTIST:

Garance Maurer is a Berlin-based French designer and transdisciplinary artist, specialized in textiles.  At the crossroads of several fields, she combines fieldwork with the creation of materials, colors, universes, shapes, and stories. She draws new perspectives for joyful and eco-responsible production and consumption by transposing the principles of textile construction to the scale of spaces and narratives. Rooted in a sociotechnical textile culture, she works with resilient solutions, local materials, and intelligent assemblages to research the forms of living. She creates projects where the processes and encounters matter as much as the final shape.

She holds a Masters in textile design from industrial design school ENSCI-Les Ateliers (Paris), which was awarded with the ‘innovation’ distinction in 2018. She has been working in various sectors from craft to industry, from design to architecture, and from artistic research to collective activism. She was invited to carry out artistic residencies in Mexico (Alliances Françaises du Mexique), in the French Alps (l’envers des pentes), in Corsica (Fabbrica Design), in Hungary (Balatorium, European Capital of Culture). 

Garance is now a resident of the Villa Albertine San Francisco, a residency program of the French Foreign Affairs Ministry, as well as an invited artist at CCA where she investigates the many faces and social dynamics around fire in the Pyrocene in California: from megafires and wildfires to good fire practices such as prescribed and cultural burns.

Her work has been exhibited in National Museums and independent galleries across France, Mexico, Hungary and Germany.

Tending alterity, collective practices, and community knowledge, she’s involved in several spatial and performative practices collectives? She's active member of Floating University Berlin since 2021 where she works as an artist, educator, editor and curator and the co-founder of the activist and disruptive theater Collectif Trouble.

Garance Maurer

garancemaurer.com

About Villa Albertine, The French Institute for Culture and Education 

Villa Albertine strengthens ties between the US, France, and the French-speaking world by connecting people and institutions in the spheres of culture and education. In the arts sphere, we encourage collaboration among French and US-based organizations and

 provide creators and thought leaders with residencies, grants, and connections to audiences so they can explore and share new insights into society’s pressing issues. In the field of education, we craft projects and programs aimed at making French language and culture accessible to all US audiences, support partnerships between French and American higher education and research institutions and expand opportunities for students to study and complete internships in France.  

With offices in 10 major US cities, Villa Albertine is headquartered in New York’s historic Payne Whitney mansion, home to Albertine, our bookshop and nexus for French-American intellectual exchange. 

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