Esther Michaud

Esther Michaud (b. 1993) grew up in the Ardennes, today she lives and works in Paris. After a stint at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in textiles, she graduated in 2018 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in Printed Image. Esther Michaud’s work is a complex and fertile union of vegetal, manufactured and technological elements, where nature intertwines with a world entirely shaped by man. Through sculptures, installations and pictorial compositions, she intervenes in an almost surgical manner on materials collected using diverted techniques such as weaving, embroidery or welding. Her grafts combine the organic with elementary materials of industrial and technological origin. Exploring the principles of mutation and metamorphosis, she is interested in the formative process of organic entities and reinvents the language of plants. Her manipulations give birth to hybrid beings that question the limits of biological emancipation from nature. Drawing a link between entities that seem incompatible, her work proposes a symbiosis, blurring the traditional confrontation of natural/artificial, organic/inorganic, human/non-human, living/abiotic. Her works seek to cast a new light on the exploitation of nature and to question its future in the face of the impact of human intervention. ...

Founded in 2019 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris in a Haussmann-style setting, SEPTIEME opened its second space in September 2022 in Cotonou, Benin, in a 200m2 warehouse in the center of the city, to offer exhibitions in a new format to audiences in the West African sub-region. It made sense for SEPTIEME to deploy its vision spatially and to help push back the frontiers of contemporary art, as well as to contribute to the construction of new contemporary art strongholds.