ZUT Edition I
— Paris

In 2015, eighteen artists and two theorists were invited to take part in the first edition of the Zone d'Utopie Temporaire (Z.U.T.) residency program presented by Alice Bonnot. The 21 days were spent at ‘L’Amour’, an artist-run space on the outskirts of Paris. Day and night, together or alone, each artist participated in forging a Temporary Utopian Zone that came to occupy every last corner of the vast space. The theorists Lucien Labroue and Déborah Bucchi accompanied the fifteen artists through both structured conferences and more informal discussions. Many works were created in the given time period, each a singular fruit of the projects' multidisciplinary nature (sculptures, paintings, installations, performances, videos etc.) and each addressing Utopia differently.

The desire to initiate an itinerant Zone d’Utopie Temporaire stems from a deep appreciation for the focus to be gained when exposing oneself to unfamiliar environments and/or constraints. In the context of this project, ‘Utopia’ is approached as ‘a distance a society is capable of taking from itself to feign what it could become’ (Lucien Labroue, 2015); hence the particular necessity for the artists involved to take their surrounding and related realities with them when searching for utopia within themselves.
— August 2015

Nicolas Ballériaud
Antoine Boiron
Alexis Chrun
Audrey Deluc
Julia Dreiski
Céline Drouin
Cecilia Granara
Maxence Hamard
Laurent Isnard
Faustine Levin
Alex Ngo
Anna Ren
Claudia Tennat
Toba Young

Déborah Bucchi
Lucien Labroue

Alice Bonnot


Exhibition views, L’Amour, 2016

Alice Bonnot